Rogue Keeper on 10/4/2007 at 13:59
I'm glad that I didn't have to spend a long time editing STALKER CFG file just like in case of Oblivion, and I quickly found good optimum between performance and looks.
To my surprise, I can afford to use Full Dynamic Lighting on 7600GT despite that in many tests reviewers recommend turning it on only on high-end GPUs (for which I consider 7900GT and up in case of nVidia house). I can also set vision distance, object detail, grass density and shadow quality to maximum. With HDR, anti-aliasing is impossible to use and I am fine with 25% AF, or even no AF at all (I can't see the difference, but in TweakGuides they say that AF function may be broken in Stalker). All that, in 1152x864 (an unusual resolution, but my favourite one, I use it for desktop on my 17'' CRT as well) it gives me about 20-35 FPS most of the time.
Well, I don't count the load stuttering...
Medium and High settings set the texture quality by default to 75 percent, but damn, that seems too much for my PC. If I play with textures of 75% quality, the stuttering becomes so frequent that the game is unplayable most of the time. It surprises me, because I have 256 DDR3 and I would expect it to process these textures almost fluently - Stalker's textures of 75% quality look almost as detailed as the best quality textures in Oblivion, and I don't have such serious stuttering in Oblivion with best quality textures.
So I wonder, would be only 1GB RAM the case? What texture quality you normally use in Stalker and how much video memory and RAM you have ?
The medium quality textures are satisfying but I think my GPU could handle better ones - but apparently it doesn't and i'm not sure if I have to blame small RAM or there is too big quality jump between 50% and 75% textures.
Toxicfluff on 10/4/2007 at 14:13
20-35fps? Yow. I just couldn't find that enjoyable to play, no matter what the graphics.
Right, the stuttering. I've heard from many people that running Stalker with the -noprefetch command line greatly reduces level load times and in-game stuttering as well, surprisingly. One theory is that Stalker is too aggressive with the prefetch and extra stuff that needs to be loaded once in game gets shunted over into the page file, causing the massive slowdowns. Would certainly explain why sometimes just firing your weapon for the first time can give you a half second jolt. If it works for you, I reckon you'd be able to whack texture quality up to maximum.
Haven't been home to have the opportunity to try it myself yet though, but I'm hopeful that I'll have the same effect as the other people.
(by the way I'm on 75% also, likewise with a gig of system ram and 256mb on the Radeon X800 - I get a lot of stuttering when first getting into the game, and some more upon entering a new level and a very occasional random bit on top of that)
Bjossi on 10/4/2007 at 14:17
Quote Posted by ToXiCFLUFF
20-35fps? Yow. I just couldn't find that enjoyable to play, no matter what the graphics.
I can easily live with 35. I had a slow PC not long ago so it got me lifetime supplies of anti-laghating meds. ;)
Toxicfluff on 10/4/2007 at 14:26
35's fine, I started out on classic Doom after all (which was capped at that). It's the 20s that spook me.
Rogue Keeper on 10/4/2007 at 14:33
Ah right, -noprefetch.
I am using this command, and as Tweak Guides suggest, it has slowed down the first load time considerably, but on the other hand it didn't seem to significantly reduce stuttering for me.
I think I can try to defragment the hard drive or play with the page file settings but I don't think it would solve much.
With that with 35 FPS I meant probably the highest framerate cap, when there aren't so many objects on the scene. Sometimes I can get as much as 45 for a short moment, but if I normally walk an open area with high visibility range it would be about 18-25. I see the little magic in my well known ignorance of AA&AF and also in 1152x864, that's a good compromise between 1024x768 (too grainy for these days I guess) and 1280x1024. The average FPS difference between 1152x864 and 1280x1024 is very small, but sometimes every frame counts if I want to push other details up a bit.
Bjossi on 10/4/2007 at 14:35
Wouldn't page-file tweaking only benefit those who have less than 1.5 - 2 GBs of memory?
Rogue Keeper on 10/4/2007 at 14:45
That means for people like me...
Bjossi on 10/4/2007 at 14:57
Ouch. :erm:
But hey, I could be way wrong here, right now my page file is being used by Windows and a few other programs it seems; 0.3/3.6 GBs.
Just defragment the drive, close heavy applications that you don't need while playing. It's far fetched, but you might get a boost if you close explorer.exe and then run Stalker through the New Task dialog.
ZylonBane on 10/4/2007 at 14:57
Quote Posted by ToXiCFLUFF
35's fine, I started out on classic Doom after all (which was capped at that).
What? I've seen the old DOS version of Doom running at well in excess of 35 FPS.
Rogue Keeper on 10/4/2007 at 15:05
Now I remember they write in sys requirements that we should have 10GB HDD space free. Lord knows why, it needs such big page file? Because I have only 4 GB space left on that drive.
