Just starting out... Performance issues?

Gonchong on 5/7/2007 at 14:47

Hey
Just got this and I've been playing through the cordon area up to the train. Awesome. Love the torches at night in the distance.

Only thing is any lighting except static seems to kill it, and the Hard drive starts thrashing away. Does Full Dynamic use more memory? Runs well with static, but I don't want to feel that I'm missing out!

Tried the Float32 mod - heard good things about it and it does improve stuff a little bit.

Specs: (Mid-range)
AMD Sempron 64 3000+, ATI X1950pro 512, 1GB DDR.

D'Arcy on 5/7/2007 at 15:32

FDL does improve the game's look considerably, but unless you have a decent card you'd better stay away from it. I'm an NVidia fan myself, and know little about ATI cards, but I believe yours is more or less equivalent to mine (I have a 7800GS-GLH 512MB), and yet I'm able to play with FDL. The main difference that I notice between your rig and mine is that I have 2GB DDR.

Bjossi on 5/7/2007 at 16:13

1 GB of memory is way too little for this game if you intend to use HQ graphics settings. :erm:

steo on 5/7/2007 at 16:16

You could try reducing texture quality, I've got a similar spec and found I could just about get playable frame rates on FDR if I lowered texture quality.

Gonchong on 6/7/2007 at 08:33

Thanks for the responses.
It's about playable on Full Dynamic if i use -noshadows. Disabling prefetch also helps but it seems to affect stability. Lowering texture res helps too.
The whole issue is definitely memory related though, as you say. I can pan the camera round like a dream if i stay in one place and don't cause anything more to load.

Time to invest in another GB. I'll consider it an investment for Bioshock...

D'Arcy on 6/7/2007 at 09:27

Memory is relatively cheap these days, so at least it shouldn't be a very big effort. It would be worse if the GPU were the problem :)

Bjossi on 8/7/2007 at 21:22

But not much worse, a good GPU for Stalker doesn't cost much more than $100, like the 7600 GT, and for ~$150 you can grab a 8600 GT.

charlestheoaf on 9/7/2007 at 08:10

I read somewhere a while back that a proper shader file wasn't included to run on ATI cards (iirc), which is affecting me as well.

I thought I had heard of this being fixed in a later patch, but I really can't remember now. It's been a long time since I've played.

BEAR on 9/7/2007 at 23:33

I might suggest waiting for the next patch which is supposed to improve performance, concidering you havent really gotten into it yet.

D'Arcy on 10/7/2007 at 00:48

I believe that so far all patches were supposed to improve performance. And this next one probably improves it because it includes the Float 32 mod.