Nvidia Stalker 2 benchmarks suggest CPU may be restricted, but DLSS 3 seems to make a huge difference at 4K resolution

Published:

Stalker 2 almost has its irradiated gloves on us, and it’s pretty good more updated system requirements (how many times has that been the case?), we now have some idea of ​​how the game might run, at least according to Nvidia.

In blog post While announcing DLSS 3 support in Stalker 2, Nvidia is also releasing its own benchmarks for certain RTX 40 series graphics cards. It compares average frame rates for GPUs at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions with DLSS 3 disabled and enabled.

- Advertisement -

The main takeaways? Well, taking everything with a grain of salt, since these are Nvidia’s own tests, first of all, the Unreal Engine 5-based game should run quite well for a seemingly very good-looking game. We’re talking about 60fps or more at max settings at 1080p and 1440p with the RTX 4070 and above, though to be more specific, the 4070 averages 1.2fps lower than at 1440p. By the way, this is without DLSS 3 support enabled.

Add DLSS 3 to the mix, and Nvidia says Stalker 2 should run at above 70 frames per second on the RTX 4060 Ti at 1440p and above 120 frames per second with the RTX 4070 Ti Super. However, the real gains are made at 4K resolution, where we see gains that are well over double. For example, the RTX 4080 Super apparently jumps from 47.1fps to 112.7fps on average with DLSS 3 enabled at 4K resolution.

Moving from 4K to 1080p and to a lesser extent 1440p, we also see a perhaps surprising (with DLSS 3 support disabled) plateau in frame rates for higher-end cards – certainly with the RTX 4070 Ti Super and newer, and maybe even with the RTX 4070 Great.

(Image: Nvidia)

Of course, we’d expect a slight drop in FPS at lower resolutions, as games put less stress on the GPU and more on the CPU the lower the number of pixels displayed. However, the degree of this leveling off, and the fact that it seems to be starting to catch up with the RTX 4070 at 1080p and also level at 1440p a bit higher up the GPU list, is noticeable enough to make one suspect that Stalker 2 may be particularly CPU-heavy – obliged.

However, I repeat that these are Nvidia’s data, not ours, so we cannot say anything certain yet.

One thing that could make Stalker 2 more CPU dependent is the exploit of Lumens instead of ray tracing for global illumination. Lumen is software-based and mainly CPU-based. However, it can be of lower quality than ray tracing and cause some flickering at higher resolutions because it renders things at a low resolution, does its ray tricks and creates a featherlight map, and then rescales everything.

CPU-related or not, Lumen or not, these initial tests seem quite 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, the largest of which are 160 GB of memory and a minimum of 16 GB RAM.

Related articles