Stalker 2 almost has its irradiated mitts on us and alongside even more updated system requirements (how many times is that, now?), we now have some idea how the game might run, at least according to Nvidia.
In a blog post announcing DLSS 3 support in Stalker 2, Nvidia also shares its own benchmarks for some RTX 40-series graphics cards. It compares average frame rates for the GPUs at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions with DLSS 3 off and with it on.
Moving down from 4K to 1080p and, to a lesser extent, 1440p, we also [[link]] see a perhaps surprising (DLSS 3-disabled) frame rate plateau with the higher-end cards—certainly with the RTX 4070 Ti Super and above, and perhaps even with the RTX 4070 Super.
Of course, we would expect frame rates to plateau a little at lower resolutions because games become less GPU-bound and more CPU-bound the fewer the number of pixels being displayed. But the extent of this levelling out, and the fact that it seems to start to level with the RTX 4070 at 1080p and also levels out at 1440p a little higher up the GPU list, is noticeable enough to suspect that Stalker 2 might be particularly CPU-bound.
Again, though, these are Nvidia's figures and not our own, so we can't say anything for certain, yet.
One thing that could make Stalker 2 more CPU-dependent would be the use of Lumen rather than ray tracing for global illumination. Lumen's software-based and relies primarily on the CPU. It can also be lower quality than ray tracing and cause some flickering at higher resolutions, though, because it renders things at a low resolution, does its ray shenanigans and creates a lightmap, [[link]] and then upscales everything.
CPU-bound or not, Lumen or not, these initial benchmarks seem pretty promising, especially for those who don't mind using DLSS 3. Which is at least some consolation in the face of the latest system requirements, 160 GB storage and 16 GB minimum RAM being the big ones.
