Well I decided to try out Stalker, and am getting severe lag, I mean like 5fps type lag . I'll start with my specs wich are as follows: P4 3.0ghz prescott BFG 7800GS OC, 8x agp, 256mb Corsaire 1 gig (2x512) mem Nothing is overlcoked at all. Well I started the game and got about to the outside door up the stairs after accepting a task (whatever they call em) I haven't played the game very long at all, just ben busy and all, so haven't had much time to do much with the game yet. My nv cp settings are 4x fsaa, 16x aniso. In game is the same way, but I have adjusted in game sliders up and down, medium settings, turned things down, 1280x960x32 res, and nothing I do seems to work, I still get lag severely, and I do mean lag, so laggy it's pretty well a chop fest. I would love to try the game out, but at this rate, it's not even enjoyable and/or playable. So what I was looking for is some tips and ideas as far as what to do. I haven't got a clue as to what to do, because everything I do seems to have no affect at all. Maybe I can't play this game on this video card? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Other than upgrading your system, turning off dynamic lighting and turning down IQ there is not allot you can do. 1gig of ram with a 256mb GPU is not helping any. Make sure your drivers are up to date and configured properly and wait for a patch like most everybody else is doing. You can do what I did and toss it. Tweakguides has everything written in detail on how to get this game to run. http://www.tweakguides.com/STALKER_1.html
The first thing you need to do is apply the -noprefetch tweak. I'm not going to waste my time elaborating on that more since you can just google it. Beyond that, you should make sure that you have as little as possible running in the background. I just bought another gigabyte of RAM (used to have 1Gb before) and that has made a noticeable difference, though in all honesty the game does still stutter at fixed places (such as the bus parked sideways across the road at the Garbage and others). The game is a memory hog, so you should do whatever you can to free up some memory. Also make sure that your hard-drive is defragmented, and more importantly that you have a contiguous pagefile at least 1024mb in size. Also, with 1Gb of RAM and a 256mb GPU, there's no way you can run the game well with texture quality at anything over 50%. Even I run it with texture detail at 75% (though I'm probably going to bump it up to 100% now that I've got 2Gb of RAM). It's also quite useless trying to force AA/AF from the nVidia control panel because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses a shading method which doesn't allow for traditional AA. AF can be forced from in-game.
Turn off AA coz this game, for whatever reason, is very hard on a system.....especially the GPU. Lower ingame setting and try it again.......I don't thing a 7900GT can handle this game with AA, let alone a 7800GS. Even a 320mb 8800GTS can't do very well at STALKER, but playable at least - http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf8800gts320MB-roundup_18.html#sect0
tru cordon is playable with everything maxed but after that memory becomes a problem i shut off AA and A filtering and thats helps a lot
AA and AF don't work in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., so either you're lying or it was the placebo effect fooling you.
Well I had a AMD64 3200+ running at 2.5ghz with a 7900GT KO and STALKER lagged a bit on parts of the level I turned down almost everything and it helpped a bit, but what really made the difference was upgrading from 3200 to a 6320 it seems that STALKER uses alot of CPU horsepower. No lag with med settings on the 7900GT and the 6320. Now with the 8800GTS I max everything run at 1280 and no lag period. As for AA/AF working in STALKER I have no idea but I turned everything to maximum settings and it worked maybe I will check into if AA was working. This seems strange that AA/AF would not work in stalker?!?
If you turn off The Dynamic Lighting an use Static Lighting your FPS will skyrocket 10x in most cases. you will loss the shadows casted from light sources, but it will be creamy smooth.
Thanks for all the input and advice, it's much apprciated, and yes ruin that did the trick, I run alot smoother now
If you would have read the first post to your question two days ago then you would have been running smoother then. I want credit where credit is due, LOL. Just kidding. Glad you are playable now.
LOL, sorry, I work overnights, well I did till last night I am now on dayside again WOOHOO, anyways, I worked overnights and was really tired when I posted, so I do appologize, I give everyone credit, so thanks to you too. The game is alot harder than I thought though, I am over rescueing Nigel I think his name is, the first mission, and always getting killed LOL, but still fun.
are you sure they have no effect ? it started a slideshow after entering garbage , i put both of those sliders @ 0 instead of max and voila , good again not lying here , why should i
Well, unless you're playing with Static Lighting, no, neither AA or AF work. Why? Because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses a rendering type called Deferred Shading, with which regular FSAA cannot be used in conjunction. As to why AF doesn't work, well, I don't know, but isn't it pretty obvious that it doesn't work when you stare at the blurry ground 15 meters away?
Put it back to Full Dynamic and Exit. Open up C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\STALKER-SHOC\user.ltx in notepad. Goto the bottom and change the Texture_LOD or whatever from 0 to 2. I cannot tell the difference in visual quality, and I can run the game at 1280x1024, ful dynamic, 8x af, everything maxed at atleast 30FPS. It only goes as high as 60 or so, but this is what I do, and the gameplay is smooth. Of course you can run in static, for 100FPS or something, but give this a shot and see if its playable for you. Stalker doesn't really need a ton of frames like other Shooters. It's faily slow paced action wise I find.
All that does is change the texture quality from 100% to 50%. And I can notice a very distinct difference between 100% and 50%, in fact, ever since I've had 2Gb of RAM, I've also had texture quality set to 100%, and the game doesn't lag any more than it did with texture quality @ 75%. Of course, my GPU is also equipped with 512mb of Vram, so that might have something to do with it...
I have almost the same system specs as Marley had, the game was literally unplayable with the 7900GT on 1 GB of ram, even on static lighting, it stuttered beyond frustration. So i got rid of it and bought an x1950 Pro. The difference was day and light, before i was struggling to get even playable fps, whereas now the scenario completely changed. It was very, very playable for me than before. I suspect it to be due to lack of driver updates since november 2006. The game does have some very serious memory intensive issues, and after completing the game twice in a row, the only one particular area where it literally becomes a slideshow is the military warehouse area. My peak memory usage with 7900GT had gone as high as 1.8GB (I have only 1 GB RAM), with the x1950 pro 512MB, it has dropped to 1.3 GB. Settings i use are: 1. In the shortcut---> -noprefetch -nointro -noshadows -mblur 2. In game console--> r2_ls_bloom_fast on (gives an overbright hdr effect) 3. In game console--> r2_ls_bloom_threshold 0.100 (controls the hdr effect above) 4. In game console--> r2_tf_mipbias -0.500 (AA & AF are both broken in Stalker, this is the only way to improve texture sharpness, however reduce the value too low and there'll be way too much texture shimmering and aliasing. A value b/w 0.25-0.500 seems to be the best to me with no shimmering) 5. In game console--> r2_mblur on Hope you like the way i play this game
I tried to play the game with everything at max at first and it was slow to run, not a slide show but very laggy. I didnt have to turn off AA or AF to fix the issue, I just lowered my resolution down from 1920x1080 to 1200x700. The game looked exactly the same to me I couldnt see the diffrence in details with the lower resolution but it plays perfectly smooth with all the settings still on high. I think I would rather play a lower res with high settings vs high res with low settings any day. So if you didnt think of trying that yet and you miss the visual effects try turning down the res to the next lowest that has the same aspect.
