We have actually invested a significant quantity of time over the previous couple of days gazing at the Shader Compilation filling screen in a brand-new video game called Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. For a few of you, the video game requires no intro. Honestly, that experience has actually been more pleasurable than evaluating half the items we've examined in 2024, so most likely not even splitting the leading 10 most uninteresting things I've done this year (that was a joke– I like what I do)…
Shader collection filling screens aside, we've handled to check Stalker 2 today, right after the day-one spot was launched, benchmarking 31 various GPUs throughout 3 resolutions utilizing 3 quality presets, plus arises from quality upscaling (!). There's plenty to go over.
Stalker 2 is a first-person shooter/survival scary single-player video game established utilizing Unreal Engine 5. It's the 4th primary video game in the Stalker series, and shockingly, it's been 15 years because the last release, Call of Pripyat. That video game was a staple for our CPU and GPU screening back then, so it's amazing to lastly see a brand-new Stalker title.
Without losing any more time, let's get into it. The benchmark pass we utilized for this analysis occurs in the Lesser Zone, among the very first towns you experience. This area was picked since it is extremely requiring on both the CPU and GPU.
As we simply discussed, we evaluated numerous quality presets. Altering the quality settings needs rebooting the video game, and this sets off shader restoring– a procedure that takes a number of minutes. Performing this procedure a minimum of 3 times per GPU, for an overall of 31 GPUs, produced a fascinating (and prolonged) screening experience.
We evaluated the Epic predetermined both at native resolution and with quality upscaling, together with the High and Medium presets. For upscaling, we utilized DLSS on GeForce GPUs, FSR on Radeon GPUs, and XeSS for the Arc A770. The video game supports FSR and DLSS frame generation, we did not consist of those in this analysis.
Before diving into the criteria, we wish to attend to the efficiency variation in between 8GB and 16GB VRAM GPUs. A few of the upcoming charts will highlight bad 8GB efficiency on the Epic predetermined, even with upscaling made it possible for. To much better comprehend this, we've taken a more detailed take a look at the problem.
Criteria 8GB vs 16GB VRAM Frame Time Comparison
Legendary – 1080p Native
Beginning with the native 1080p outcomes utilizing the Epic predetermined, we see the RTX 4090 providing simply over 100 fps in the village utilized for screening. This outcome appears to be CPU-limited, even though screening was carried out with the 9800X3D. This appears since the RTX 4090 was just 9% faster than the RTX 4080 Super and 23% faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The Radeon GPU's efficiency wasn't especially outstanding here, approximately matching the RTX 4070 Ti Super,
