charlestheoaf on 11/4/2007 at 09:14
There are some areas where I can run the game perfectly fine on the highest lighting setting (even during large gunfights) after a bit of overclocking.
Other areas it gets down to maybe 1 frame every 5 seconds.
So static lighting for me :/
Bjossi on 11/4/2007 at 14:20
Quote Posted by Jashin
Stalker plays as fast or as slow as you like, so fps is really not that important.
It actually is, 20+ I find very playable but a game gets very hard & annoying to control when you start to see each frame very clearly.
Sulphur on 11/4/2007 at 19:59
Quote Posted by BR796164
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.
.
.
.
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.
Glad to hear you've got it running in its full glory, mate. Toldja it would work. ;)
As I mentioned back in the H.O.P.E.F.U.L thread, there's quite a bit of stuttering the minute you push the texture detail slider past the midway point.
It looks like a RAM problem, for the most part. 1 GB ain't enough, really, because it looks like those textures must be absolutely massive to cache. After all, the game does have to load those textures from your hard disk first before you can see them on the screen.
Bump up the texture settings and take a look at your hard-disk light when you run around an area that stutters massively, and you'll see what I mean.
Oblivion doesn't suffer from the same problem because it probably doesn't do caching/prefetching that's as aggressive. Or perhaps it uses somewhat lower-resolution textures. Or maybe Bethesda's programmers use a smarter texture-streaming algorithm.
I'm guessing that the game would run much better with 2 gigs of RAM. We have similar parallels with HL2 running on 512MB and 1GB.
Oh, and the whole more lighting = less performance equation? True. I've noticed that in Stalker, too.
Reminds me of something that Monolith's designers for F.E.A.R said about the engine - every time they added a light to a scene, the engine had to redraw that scene that many times. So if you had five dynamic lights in a room, the engine would have to redraw the room five different times to get you a complete frame.
Bjossi on 11/4/2007 at 20:20
Don't forget video memory. 512 MBs over 256 MBs makes a huge difference in today's games, maybe even 640 or 768 MBs will show a visible boost over 512 MBs.
Sulphur on 11/4/2007 at 20:54
True.
(
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2926&p=3) http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2926&p=3
That's between a 320MB 8800 GTS and its 640MB counterpart. Looks the like extra RAM helps in cases where there's really large amounts of textures being streamed, or in high resolutions with AA enabled.
A new graphics card with more VRAM would be great, but I'm waiting to see how the R600 pans out. This perpetual war between nVidia and ATi sure is fun. I'd love to see what happens to the 8800's prices once ATi's new line is out. :cheeky:
In the meantime, I'm sure an extra stick of mainboard RAM would be the cheaper alternative. It's almost guaranteed to minimise any stuttering, because half the game wouldn't be paged to your swap file any more.
Rogue Keeper on 12/4/2007 at 08:21
In sys requirements they suggest that High system would include 8800 with 512 MB, so I guess this should suffice for highest quality textures and process them without stuttering, under condition that the system includes 2GB RAM as well.
I even believe 256DDR3 could process highest quality textures too and the gameplay would be still semi-fluent - if I had 2 GB RAM (they suggest 1,5GB for a recommended system).
Bjossi on 12/4/2007 at 16:37
8800 only exists in 320, 640 and 768 MBs vRAM. ;)
Yakoob on 12/4/2007 at 21:34
For me, I cannot stand low frame rates because the game just gets too choppy to be controllable. That is, I simply cannot aim correctly at a too low of a frame rate and my response time also suffers from the same problem.
Bjossi on 12/4/2007 at 22:07
That applies to everyone, it is just different for each individual where the framerate gets to the point of being too low to be playable.
For example my dad beat Doom 3 with average 11 FPS...
Rogue Keeper on 13/4/2007 at 07:10
Quote Posted by Bjossi
8800 only exists in 320, 640 and 768 MBs vRAM. ;)
Yes, actually they literally wrote "512 MB DirectX® 9.0c compatible card / nVIDIA® GeForce™ 8800 / ATI Radeon® X2800"
