I heard it mentioned several times that Stalker has not been properly adjusted to widescreen. How are the GOG versions in this regard? Is the field of vision really too low, the view compared to 4:3 stretched or cut? Or is it fine without using this software I found, FOV Switcher? Thanks much for your input!

I know that Call of Pripyat is fairly low. Not sure about the other two. My sensitivity to love FOV depends a lot on the day :P

The FOV in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games is a bit low. I think is actually about 67.50 and CoP actually as low as 55.

In order to change the FOV, you need to modify the .dll files. Search for "Stalker FOV switcher 1.7".

What's funny, is now that I've installed SoC I found it runs somewhat smoothly only on the low quality setting due to my puny system. So thinking about widening the FOV isn't an option really, as I figure showing more on screen would lower the performance on top. But I'm alright with the default FOV in SoC, although if I had the hardware, I'd likely open it up a bit more. Gotta work with what you have I guess.

Thanks for your input in any case, I gave everyone a +1. Cheers!

I don't think that will be the case... you still have the same number of pixels, after all. You should at least give it a try to see if it causes a performance hit or not.

I tried it tonight, increased the FOV to 75 and you are right, I can't see a drop in performance. Didn't expect that. Thanks for making me reconsider, +1. It plays way nicer now.

Pixels aren't everything. The performance hit should be rather small (and according to chevkoch it is) but higher FOV does theoretically have a performance impact as it's still more details that have to be rendered. The exact impact depends on many factors, though, and most of the time it's probably gonna be tiny - so yeah, I'd never suggest keeping FOV small for performance reasons either but the stress a game puts on the GPU may (and even should) change depending on the FOV.

I think you are right with this. Why I initially didn't even want to bother widening the FOV was because of someone on the Steam forums complaining about a huge performance drop when using a related fix. That person was seeing a rather dramatic decrease in FPS, but played the game at max settings. I'm at the other end of the quality spectrum, playing a very reduced Stalker, so this is likely the reason why I'm not experiencing any more stutter really while navigating the Zone, upped FOV or not.

If you need more performance I recommend Shaders Max and choose the Full Performance option, basically only optimizations done and I don't believe they're changed (how they look) so should be good to go for a first playthrough.

Not sure if I'm doing this right, as I don't see any difference with that mod. I altered fsgame.ltx (see attached pic - I erased my c: path for privacy reasons though to show it here), changed "false" in that second line to "true" - which messed the formatting up a bit, does that matter? Likely not, I figure.
Then I took ShaderSettings.txt from Graphics Presets\Full Performance etc. and placed it into my stalker folder here: gamedata\shaders\r2 (backed up the original file first).
Is that correct?

Tried it with all three presets (incl. the Extreme one) and yeah, not really noticing any change.

Did you add the gamedata folder before applying the specified options? You need to do that first. I don't know if the formatting is important in fsgame.ltx but for safety reason I changed it so it looked as it originally did.

And you shouldn't notice a difference regarding graphics if you haven't touched any settings, only performance with the Full Performance preset. There's also an Optimized version you could try to but if your computer can't handle the game even at lower settings I suppose it won't be a good performance/IQ gain anyway.

I extracted the STALKERShadersMAX1.06.rar package, took the gamedata folder from there and placed it into my stalker folder. Then I copied ShaderSettings.txt(Full Performance one) and placed it into the gamedata\shaders\r2 folder.

Maybe it's a slight improvement in performance that I'm not really noticing on my weak system? Which is, by the way: Athlon 64 3000+ 2.0 GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9550 (256MB), Windows XP.
I'm playing Stalker on 800x600, minimal quality settings. Looks nasty, but I get up to 60 FPS, still stutters here and there though.

I'll format fsgame.ltx to look as before and try again to rule that possibility out.

EDIT: Formatting didn't make a difference, I think. Anyway, thanks much for your input you gave on this! +1

I forgot about one thing. Shaders are affected by the graphics card which mean if you don't see an improvement your GPU isn't the initial (in this case at least) the largest bottleneck, it likely is either CPU power or your amount of physical RAM.

There's always settings in the user.ltx that you could lower even beyond in-game's lowest but it will look even uglier and the performance gain could likely be quite low.

Have you checked how much RAM the game drains during gameplay? If that is an issue you could download something like Game Booster that conveniently shuts down all background applications you choose along with certain system services (and then returns them once you quite the game).

In case of CPU power I believe there's only overclocking but I don't recommend that.

I'm not sure how much you care for performance or graphics in general but if you do care about both I would recommend you to wait with the game as it's much more fun to play it with the atmosphere that comes with a decent image quality and decent performance.

Looked at Game Booster, seems to poke the system at too many places for my taste. Just me, being a bit paranoid and wanting to avoid having my computer messed up.
And yeah, not sure when a new machine will arrive. For now, I'll pretend it's the late 90s (where I enjoyed Half-Life, Quake and others) graphics-wise and keep playing. Can't wait now, though I agree, better visuals and performance would add to the atmosphere :)
Really appreciate your input, Nirth, thanks again for your time!