Introduction

"Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl" marks the long-awaited return of the iconic S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, arriving 15 years after the release of "Stalker: Call of Pripyat" in 2009. We finally get to go back to the legendary Zone, a radioactive wasteland warped by the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. The game takes you to a world full of dangerous enemies, rival factions, mutated creatures and deadly anomalies, uncovering the dark truths behind the Zone.

With its dynamic open world, advanced survival mechanics, and branching storylines shaped by player choices, "Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl" revitalizes the beloved franchise with cutting-edge visuals and a gripping narrative. Combining survival horror with deep storytelling, this long-anticipated sequel captures the essence of the Stalker series while also introducing new layers of tension and immersion.



Stalker 2 is developed by GSC Game World—the famous Ukrainian game studio. Unreal Engine 5 is used, which has the ability to deliver stunning visuals as we've seen in other releases this year. While the first Stalker games used DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, this year's release is built with full support for DirectX 12. Unreal's "Lumen" technology is used, but only in the software, shader-based, version. Unfortunately there is no support for hardware ray tracing.

The full range of modern upscaling technologies is included, such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. You also get frame generation support using AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS 3—both can be enabled and disabled separately.

This review will evaluate the performance of Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the "Epic" settings profile, with all upscalers disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The "Graphics" menu has presets, which are "Low," "Medium," "High," and "Epic"
• Please do note that selecting any one of those profiles will set upscaling resolution to 66%!! This will look terrible at lower resolution, especially when using TAA. I've manually set it to 100% throughout this article
• You may disable motion blur by setting "Motion Blur Strength" to 0%
• Sharpness defaults to 20%, which is a reasonable default
• The upscalers available are "Off," "TAA," "TSR," "NVIDIA DLSS," "AMD FSR," and "Intel XeSS"
• DLAA and FSR Native are supported, by selecting "NativeAA" in "Upscaling quality"
• Both FSR and DLSS Frame Generation are supported. You may enable them separately, so GeForce 30 owners can use DLSS Upscaling with FSR Frame Generation
• In addition to that, there are several options for fine-tuning performance on your system

• You can choose between "fullscreen," "borderless," or "windowed"
• The field of view can be adjusted between 70 and 110 degrees. I found the default of 90° a little bit too narrow and increased it to 100°
• V-Sync can be disabled completely, there is no hidden FPS cap
• The FPS limiter can be set to 30, 60, 120, 240 and unlimited
• If the image is too dark for you, increase the Gamma setting. The default on my system was around 0.4, which made it extremely hard to see enemies and navigate the maps. After switching to 0.7, things were much more enjoyable