STALKER 2 could become a FPS nightmare on mid-level GPUs

There’s roughly a week left until the release of STALKER 2 Heart of Chernobyl, but there could be some grey clouds for those who don’t have a top-end GPU on their PC system.

Hardware giant Nvidia has pushed out their latest driver update ahead of the game’s launch and has also published the expected FPS (frames per second) one can obtain to get on their system. The numbers revealed by Nvidia are all based on the 4000 series cards, and things aren’t looking too bright if you want to have great FPS counts and the best graphical settings at the same time.

STALKER 2 will need an incredibly good GPU to run at the highest settings

It’s pretty obvious that STALKER 2 would require good hardware if you want to have the highest settings. The game’s Steam page makes that part crystal clear. However, based on the readings from Nvidia, we now have a fair idea about just how intense it will get a week later.

All the readings have been taken on a system a꧒t 1080P Super Resolution quality mode, having an i9-14900K, 64GB RAM, and Win 11 x64.

Unless you’re running with DLSS enabled, you won’t be able to achieve 90 FPS on a single Nvidia card (it’s hard to imagine if someone will have a better setup in terms of the CPU and RAM). If you’re not using DLSS and have either the RTX 4060 or its Ti variant, you won’t be able to reach 60 FPS unless you’re willing to sacrifice the graphical quality.

This raises a lot of question marks for someone like me—I have a 5600G and an RTX 3060 (along with 16 GB RAM). While I was expecting to sacrifice some of the graphical settings to get higher FPS, it seems that it might not be enough. While we should all be able to run the game on a 3000 series card, the question is—how well will STALKER 2 run on them?

The exact answer will be known a week from now when the eagerly anticipated game goes live on November 20. But it’s fair to keep our expectations in check for the time being. Based on the latest numbers from Nvidia, most of us may have to reduce the graphical presets just to get a smooth 60 FPS experience.