S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stands for... @ WebNV

John Yannotta said

John Yannotta [ guest ] — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 08:21:11 EDT

I FEEL YOUR PAIN!!!

My PC is slightly older technology:
Intel P4 HT 3.0GHz
Intel D865PERL MBD (800MHz FSB)
2GB DDR (400MHz)
300GB SATA -150 HDD

but my video card is almost current technology:
ATI X1950 Pro 512MB GDDR3 AGP-8x

Yet for some reason i get horrible framerates in STALKER...
I've been running Vista for all of 3 weeks now and i believe Vista (or crap ATI Vista driver) is the culprit...

Under XP i had MUCH better framerates with the EXACT same hardware...

Having been certified and employed in the I.T. industry for the past decade (network administration) and having used windows since the days of NT i've tried every possible tweak to Vista i could think of.. I've even scoured the net for ideas.. Even with Vista stripped down to bare bones (only 10 services running approx) i still can't achieve the framerate i achieved under XP...
also, beware of the random crash in lots of games on Vista
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105)

Also a small interesting note. STALKER on Vista @ 1280x960 gave me 29.4 FPS and on XP gave me 44.6 FPS averages over a 4 hour test i did using FRAPS , yeah, i loaded the exact same saved game in XP and Vista and played for 2 hours on each doing as close to the same things on each go

Hank4200 said

Hank4200 [ guest ] — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:03:47 EDT

and i got vista premium and it works with it so its not that

Hank4200 said

Hank4200 [ guest ] — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:02:16 EDT

i have a athlon 64 x2 4600+ 2gig of ram and only a x1200 radeon (getting a better vid card later) and it dosent lag and grafics are good no problem at all and btw wat kind of motherboard do ya have i have a gigabit GA-MA69G-S3H and dont give me crap n say i dont matter what motherboard cuz that a load of shit

Nick Villescas said

Nick Villescas [ author ] — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:04:58 EDT

kinetika:

Are you running Vista or XP? With Vista you're going to have some performance issues, but I've heard the game runs and looks great on XP. So really, that's what it boils down to.

kinetika said

kinetika [ guest ] — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:37:55 EDT

I'm glad I've just read this as I was about to get this game today. I'm wondering what sort of frame rate I could expect from a p4 prescott 3.2@3.6, asus p4c800-e dlx, 2gb pc3200 dual channel corsair and an x1950 pro 512mb?

Is still worth me getting this game?

Heavy_Metal said

Heavy_Metal [ guest ] — Mon, 21 May 2007 03:06:52 EDT

hmmmm. maybe vista is really the problem? I have AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 3800+, MSI GeForce 7600 256mb, 2gb RAM DDR2 800mhz (in a week it's gonna be 3gb), 300gb hdd SATA, and XP, and the game urns SMOOTH with all graphic maxed out in 1024x768. I can also run the game at higher resolutions, but then it starts to skip JUST A LITTLE BIT when it comes to some more action. So IMHO it is vista problem. Tried patching stalker to v 1.3? fixes lot of issues.

jonan777 said

jonan777 [ guest ] — Tue, 15 May 2007 07:02:33 EDT

I had the same problem in vista so i change back again to xp but im still getting low framerate may be its due to my resolution 1680 x 1050 its almost unplayable

Grifter said

Grifter [ guest ] — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:03:09 EDT

I have an AMD X2 5000 2.6Ghz dual-core, 500 watt PSU, 2 gigs of DDR2 5300, and an ATI X1650 Pro 512Mb PCI-E video card... And I get about 8 fps on medium settings.

On the other hand, I get between 200-300 fps on DOD:S and HL2. Go figure.

shahar said

shahar [ guest ] — Thu, 03 May 2007 03:07:01 EDT

I just finished stalker, the game, in my oppinion (as an artist working on a "next gen" game) looked as good as any game out there, and had art design to match any AAA title. (you have to see it in motion, with a full lighting model to appreciate how gorgeous and moody the environments are)

it also ran just fine on my old Athelon 3000 with a geforce 6600, 1GB RAM (work computer is better) the key is to realize where the framerate bottlenecks are... in the case of stalker, it's two things,

first,

it's the speed of your card's memory, this engine uses deferred rendering meaning lots of frame buffers being transfered inside the card every frame... meaning the resolution has a higher than normal impact on performance.

second,
this game loads immense amounts of texture data into memory
, so the texture level slider also has a huge effect on performance. once you have more textures loaded than memory on your videocard, THEN you start seeing the card swapping textures in and out of main memory and those weird pauses every few seconds

so with that in mind, try and tweak the game a bit, it looks VERY good even at lower details, and really the game is also buckets of fun, especially since you seem to enjoy oblivion, you'd probably enjoy it a lot, in my oppinion it outdid farcry, as well as any recent game in memory... but I'm just one gamer

Pedro said

Pedro [ guest ] — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:11:45 EDT

Maybe the problem is not STALKER, but Vista?

I have an AMD 3800 x2, 1Gb Dual Channel and a 7800GT. Stalker runs very smoooooth. (ok, I have Win XP 64bit)

Try install XP in another partition, or, you can uninstall Vista Garbage, install XP for games and Ubuntu for work. It's a great combination

Ransom said

Ransom [ guest ] — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:02:10 EDT

Yeah, I found the same problem. Did you try disabling the shadows? Seems like they're the reason for all the slowdown.

Nick Villescas said

Nick Villescas [ author ] — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:38:07 EDT

Well, when STALKER was first announced it looked great. Great looking graphics, concept, etc. But it took too long to be released and now doesn't look that great. Kind of disappointing. Some game devs really know how to optimize their engines for great performance no matter what (like id Software, Valve, and Crytek), but the devs behind STALKER didn't seem to do as much play testing and optimizing as they should of.

Thanks for pointing out my mis-type. I sometimes go into an emotional rage while creating these articles.

Chris Morrell said

Chris Morrell [ guest ] — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:36:12 EDT

Strange to hear that you are having trouble hitting 10 FPS with STALKER. I know they did a crappy job with their custom 3D engine but damn, 10FPS is crap. I myself haven't played the game but I've seen enough screenshots to safely say the graphics look subpar, guess you are suffering from a terribly designed engine. Now time to dance around a fire while chanting in hopes of getting Crysis to launch sooner.

ps: 7800GTX came in 256mb and 512mb variants, not 250mb ;) feel free to edit this, just pointing out an error.