Alston: A while ago, I reinstalled Shadow of Chernobyl in steam, but there was this weird microstuttering that made the game very frustrating on newer GPUs. Does anyone know if they fixed that in the GoG version? I'm thinking of buying it if they did fix it.
It's not yet fixed. This is caused mostly by loading resources as you move across a level and NPCs/mutants switch online. Resources include meshes, animations, sounds, schemes and general logic for these entities.
You can increase the switch_distance from 150 to 800 or 1200 if your processor is fast enough (and these days it likely is). But this has a side effect of triggering events across the map, as all entities are online the moment you load the level or save. It works well enough in a free-play mode, but the storyline can be affected if you haven't completed the game.
You can improve the loading times and some of the lag by loading the game on an SSD.
You can improve the lag a lot by removing all items in stashes, like secrets or storage chests. Use permabodies (dead NPCs whose bodies never go away) to store items; these do not seem to exhibit any pausing or hitching as you approach within 120-150 meters of them, unlike the stashes.
But the real lag is the CPU processing of entities as they switch online. For SoC, you might want to try the experimental (as of this post) ZRP 1.09 XR3a found
here to reduce this lag. And once the game has cached the entities on a level, there won't be any noticeable lag.
If you do use ZRP 1.09, I recommend selecting a version of actor.ltx/system.ltx with the included Modifier program to eliminate even more load on your system. In the Modifier, select
Actor.cfg from the dropdown and
*Install Actor.ltx* from the list on the left. Then set the radiobutton for "Use 1.0005/1.0006 actor.ltx and system.ltx" for normal vanilla GOG or Steam versions of the game and click
Apply. This change avoids loading the multiplayer files as well as a significant bit of the unused single-player data.
