S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl

User Rating:

ESRB: Blood and Gore,Intense Violence,Strong Language,Use of Alcohol
Publisher: THQ
Genre(s): Role Playing Game, Shooting
Home Page: http://www.stalker-game.com

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By: Jarno Kokko Mar 28, 2007

Pretty, but rough around the edges

If your system can take it, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does look very good - full dynamic lighting makes the world truly immersive as everything casts proper shadows, down to each piece of grass. At the same time things do look a bit rough. Part of it is due to stylistic design decisions as most of the textures are based on photos; the general visual look of the Zone is pretty depressing - rusted cars, abandoned buildings and overgrown vegetation. You can also see in places that the game has been in development for a long time - polygon budgets are limited, and some of the animation looks pretty stiff and limited by today's standards.

When testing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on different hardware configurations, we found out that the "Render" control is the only option that truly matters. You can run S.T.A.L.K.E.R. at otherwise maximum visual settings with "Simple lighting" active on almost anything above the minimum configuration as long as you have 1GB memory. On the other hand, no matter how low you put the settings, the game is completely unplayable with 512MB memory due to constant hard disk access, and in this regard the manufacturer's minimum settings are flat out wrong.

Full dynamic lighting. Notice the accurate shadows cast by the tree, both on the ground and on the walls.	Same spot with just Object dynamic lighting enabled - real shadows cast by the tree and the buildings are replaced with precalculated shadows.
Full dynamic lighting, notice the realistic shadows.	Same with just Object dynamic lighting - almost no difference indoors (or in performance).

Everything changes again as soon as you turn on even the limited dynamic lighting (Object dynamic lighting). The performance plummets to single digit framerates on just about any system with 1GB memory and you also need a much beefier video card. In our testing we could barely play with the "Full dynamic lighting" setting and rest of the options at Medium using an ATI Radeon X800 XT 256MB and 2GB memory - if we dropped the available memory to 1GB, constant disk access completely killed the performance. The difference between Full and Object dynamic lighting is much less significant though. The only place where you can see real dips in the frame rate is outdoors when there are lots of trees and other large objects casting shadows, and even then the difference is not major.

For our hardware suggestions, the YouGamers minimum assumes you play with Simple Lighting, and the YouGamers recommended assumes you want all of the cool dynamic lighting effects. The engine is dual core aware, and I personally would not bother playing with Full Dynamic Lighting without a dual core CPU, seriously beefy video card and 2GB memory. NVIDIA's SLI does help, but ATI's Crossfire gives no performance increase at all with the current Catalyst 7.2 drivers.

This is what you will get when dynamic lighting is switched off - the change is huge, it looks like a completely different game.

For the truly low end setups, you can also turn the textures to ugly mode, but there is little performance difference.

However, the game is perfectly playable and runs quite well even on a mediocre system as long as you keep your fingers off the Dynamic Lighting option - yes, it will look like a three year old game, but that's to be expected, as minimum system recommended is also a three years old midrange system.