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STALKER seriesReally bad performance with Clear Sky(6 posts)(6 posts)
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Posted August 25, 2015
Running 1080p in Ultra Quality, 10.1 presets and no AA the game runs very choppy. The framerates are around the 30's right in the beginning of the game in the swamp. I consider it really bad since the game is atleast six years old by now and despite the 750ti not being particular powerful it's atleast faster than the most powerfull graphics card at the time when the game was released. Running the Clear Sky benchmark i get around 60fps on max on every scene so something is wrong with the game. I've checked Vertical Sync and it's not enabled.

My computer specs are 5820K stock, 32gb ram, Nvidia Geforce 750ti 2gb with the latest graphic drivers and Windows 7.
Post edited August 25, 2015 by klappis
Posted August 26, 2015
Try keep in mind a game being old does not guarantee it will perform perfectly, better or even well on newer hardware, sometimes the opposite can even happen. Using hardware faster than what was available when a game/software was made in no way guarantees it will run flawlessly or even in real time.

You have a CPU that's really great for software optimised for multithreading, less so for single thread applications which unfortunately many games still are especially older ones, though it's still more than enough here. You graphics card though is not in such a great position.

With any game new or old they may have a feature that's very performance heavy even on hardware even in future, so when something like this happens the first thing you should try do is find out which feature/setting may be causing it. Either by putting everything onto low settings and then increasing them one by one, or starting high and lowering them one by one, until you find which setting(s) have the most impact.

In this case I would suggest starting by lowering (minimising) settings related to the Sun, Volumetric, and Particles, probably in that order and see if it helps with performance. (Don't bother with something like resolution, keep it at whatever you want/your monitors native resolution)

Try keep the whole "hardware from the future" thing in perspective, newer hardware doesn't have an equal improvement across the board, things improve in certain areas far more than others. For example a game may do something that brings current hardware down to 15 frames per second (..just for the sake of argument..) due to pixel fill rate limitations, then future hardware comes along with 1000% better geometry performance but only a 200% pixel fill rate increase, that feature could then cause the "hardware from the future" to chug along at 30 frames despite it being ridiculously faster at other things and overall. Just like a whole system can have a "bottleneck" so can a single component like a graphics card, think about how an AMD card can beat a Nvidia card in one game yet in another the Nvidia card is suddenly better.

Basically you won't be able to max out all the games settings at 1920x1080 and get 60FPS with your current hardware.
Post edited August 26, 2015 by Grogger
Posted August 26, 2015
The highest settings in these games are not very optimized and I think they were just put in by the devs in the hope of making the game more future proof without them even being able to test it at the time.

Just use lower settings, maybe even go back to DX9 and static lighting, you might not tell the difference in picturequality but as long as the framerate is smooth.
Posted September 01, 2015
avatar
Grogger: Try keep in mind a game being old does not guarantee it will perform perfectly, better or even well on newer hardware, sometimes the opposite can even happen. Using hardware faster than what was available when a game/software was made in no way guarantees it will run flawlessly or even in real time.

You have a CPU that's really great for software optimised for multithreading, less so for single thread applications which unfortunately many games still are especially older ones, though it's still more than enough here. You graphics card though is not in such a great position.

With any game new or old they may have a feature that's very performance heavy even on hardware even in future, so when something like this happens the first thing you should try do is find out which feature/setting may be causing it. Either by putting everything onto low settings and then increasing them one by one, or starting high and lowering them one by one, until you find which setting(s) have the most impact.

In this case I would suggest starting by lowering (minimising) settings related to the Sun, Volumetric, and Particles, probably in that order and see if it helps with performance. (Don't bother with something like resolution, keep it at whatever you want/your monitors native resolution)

Try keep the whole "hardware from the future" thing in perspective, newer hardware doesn't have an equal improvement across the board, things improve in certain areas far more than others. For example a game may do something that brings current hardware down to 15 frames per second (..just for the sake of argument..) due to pixel fill rate limitations, then future hardware comes along with 1000% better geometry performance but only a 200% pixel fill rate increase, that feature could then cause the "hardware from the future" to chug along at 30 frames despite it being ridiculously faster at other things and overall. Just like a whole system can have a "bottleneck" so can a single component like a graphics card, think about how an AMD card can beat a Nvidia card in one game yet in another the Nvidia card is suddenly better.

Thanks for the detailed answer! I will do as you say however i still wondering why the Clear Sky benchmark runs so much smoother than it does in the game?

Basically you won't be able to max out all the games settings at 1920x1080 and get 60FPS with your current hardware.
Posted September 01, 2015
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klappis: Thanks for the detailed answer! I will do as you say however i still wondering why the Clear Sky benchmark runs so much smoother than it does in the game?
I'm not sure about it in this instance as I've never run the benchmark, but I could give you an example of a situation that could cause something like that.

For instance Stalker has day night cycles, now lets say the game uses volumetric sun shafts which are very performance intensive, the performance impact from them would change depending on the time of day.

Like at dawn the shafts would be much longer and require a relatively larger amount of performance. Imagine volumetric sun shaft with particle effects shining through a tree straight down onto the ground below, pretty simply, but at dawn those shafts could be hitting characters, vehicles, houses, other trees etc (those shafts need to be tacked and cut off when they hit something), it would be far more complex keeping track of those shafts when that's happening (not to mention all the shadows created in this situation too).

So it's possible the benchmark is not creating a worse case scenario while actually playing the game is, I'm not saying that's what's happening here, it's just an example of how it could happen.

I think I remember when starting Clear Sky you're in a house at dawn, and if you have those performance heavy effects enabled at that time the performance might take a hit especially if it's features your graphics card struggles with. If I'm remembering that correctly that might be a good place/time to test and tweak performance, perhaps climb on the roof and look around for an angle or scene with the worst framerate and if you change the settings to get an acceptable FPS there, chances are it won't get much worse in other parts of the game.
Posted December 04, 2015
Stalker in general has some optimization issues. Turn things like Sunshafts to LOW. They are near-identical to HIGH but have FAR better performance. I also suggest looking into lowering SSAO and Sun Quality. Because to my knowledge, they are also like this. Turn AA down if possible, this is a bit subjective but I always found myself comfortable at 2x or 4x, instead of 8x.


But regardless as I said, it has optimization issues. Areas like the Clear Sky base you start in, will almost always run like crap. I believe it has something to do with the amount of AI in the area, Call of Pripyat has the same issues in the Skadovsk (Safe base in the beginning area).
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STALKER seriesReally bad performance with Clear Sky(6 posts)(6 posts)
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