More Stalker last night. Fiddled around with graphics settings again and got it to look a bit better while maintaining decent frames.
DLSS makes the game look like absolute trash. I don’t know if it’s because I can’t run the game well in the first place (I heard it works best if the game already hits 60FPS without upscaling), if it’s because I’m on 1080p (I’ve heard it looks best at 1440p and above), or what the issue is, but things far out in the distance get their LODs reduced to near 0 and they look like polygonal blobs until you get your face 10 feet away from said object. The image is blurry and muddy as hell, text is very fuzzy, any sort of movement makes the game look like sludge. I understand upscaling does stuff like this, but eventually it became unplayable for me. Same issue with FSR. That’s when I decided to mess around with graphics settings.
DLSS has always been the default for me since I have an NVIDIA card, and when that doesn’t work I tend to go to FSR, but I switched to UE5’s TSR (Temporal Super Resolution) and found that the image looks a lot crisper while maintaining my frames, and I was able to turn settings to Medium. It made me super happy last night! I’m probably pushing my PC to its absolute limits but the game runs decent and looks decent. Still some blur which is to be expected, but the image looks so much better than DLSS or FSR. I have tried Frame Generation and it does make my frames better but the input lag gets very bad to the point where I can’t stand it anymore. What I’m worried about is when I finally reach the much larger cities in the game. The starting camp, which has maybe about 10-15 NPCs in a smallish area, still makes my frames go down. I can only imagine what will happen in a much larger settlement, and I see a ton on the map.
With most of my performance woes out of the way, I knocked out a few more main missions. I figured I should grind the main mission a bit longer to open up more of the world, but the game is so damn large there is still a ton of stuff to do in just the starting area. I knocked out a few side missions and sought out a few stash boxes in the starting area. It’s a good place to grind for resources to start your journey. I’ve gotten some good weapons, a much better suit than the starting one, a gas mask, tons of ammo and healing, and I’m ready to continue on my journey.