ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 How so? A benchmark is designed to give you a good idea of how well the game will run on your hardware. The benchmark didn't run that well so the game won't run that well. I won't waste my money on a game that I can't fully enjoy. I have a decent gaming rig that handles 95% of the games out there with more-than-adequate performance. It's a shame, really. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are known to "under-perform" on decent hardware. The stalker games run fine if you tweak the settings to suit your pc spec, rather than put everything to max and expect perfect performance. I never set graphics options to max when I get a new game, I start off with low and then alter the settings to get a balance between visual quality & performance. It's something you come to expect from pc games, you always need to alter some setting to get things just right. Never go by the specifications on the back of a game. Also just because the benchmark didn't run well, doesn't mean the full game will run poorly. If a game runs poorly on a fast system, it doesn't mean it's crap. Lower the settings and try again. My problem with STALKER is the graphics are crap IMO and it still runs like crap. If it actually had good graphics they'd have an excuse :p Funny, it doesn't look like crap. The stalker games have some of the best graphical details seen recently in a game. edit, just ran the benchmark, ran fine. No I didn't use max settings, of course it would run slower, just like any other game. I used medium + full dynamic lighting and it was perfectly smooth & looked great too. You don't need max settings to enjoy a game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yusuf M. Veteran Posted February 9, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 9, 2010 The stalker games run fine if you tweak the settings to suit your pc spec, rather than put everything to max and expect perfect performance. I never set graphics options to max when I get a new game, I start off with low and then alter the settings to get a balance between visual quality & performance. It's something you come to expect from pc games, you always need to alter some setting to get things just right. Never go by the specifications on the back of a game. Also just because the benchmark didn't run well, doesn't mean the full game will run poorly. If a game runs poorly on a fast system, it doesn't mean it's crap. Lower the settings and try again. [...] I don't max out my games right off the bat. I go by what the game automatically sets it to or medium settings at first. If it runs well, which is the case most of the time, I crank up the settings a bit. Once I'm comfortable with the quality and performance, I proceed to play the game as I normally would. I don't even check the minimum/recommended specifications of my PC games. Never had the need to as I always have a decent gaming rig. I played the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and it didn't run well. I ran the benchmark for this game and it didn't run well - even after I lowered the settings. Unfortunately, one thing that really gets to me with PC games is performance. I can't enjoy a game that doesn't perform well. I've played many PC games so I've had my fair share of performance run-ins. At least with a game like Crysis, the low performance is justified by exceptional image quality. I don't doubt the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game's quality in terms of gameplay though. Maybe I'll re-run the benchmark when I buy a new gaming PC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ViperAFK Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 The stalker games run fine if you tweak the settings to suit your pc spec, rather than put everything to max and expect perfect performance. I never set graphics options to max when I get a new game, I start off with low and then alter the settings to get a balance between visual quality & performance. It's something you come to expect from pc games, you always need to alter some setting to get things just right. Never go by the specifications on the back of a game. Also just because the benchmark didn't run well, doesn't mean the full game will run poorly. If a game runs poorly on a fast system, it doesn't mean it's crap. Lower the settings and try again. Funny, it doesn't look like crap. The stalker games have some of the best graphical details seen recently in a game. :laugh: HL2 has better textures than stalker. The only good thing is the rain and sun rays. To its credit I played it today and it runs significantly better than the ridiculous hog clear sky. But the mouse movement feels very odd and I get completely random stuttering for like 4 seconds sometimes. playing at the default settings (high dx10 no aa) I can play crysis smoother on very high than I could play clear sky, and one of those games looks magnitudes better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DirtyLarry Veteran Posted February 9, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 9, 2010 Funny enough this game runs smooth as hell for me despite everyone else saying otherwise. And I am running most everything at max, 1920 x 1080, and it really is the lighting that kills FPS, but even with the highest lighting settings, I still get over 30 fps. :iiam: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DirtyLarry Veteran Posted February 9, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 9, 2010 Just to add to the above, here are the results from the benchmark I ran for a little bit, shooting and action going on... And here are the settings I am using... All graphics settings (looks a little weird as I combined them all in Photoshop) Basically it is the lighting in this game that kills FPS. Other than that though they have made major improvements to this engine, as I remember trying the older STALKER when I first got this comp and it did not run this well at all. Once I get back into the daylight I will take some screens of the game in action. :laugh: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cheshire Cat Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 I got the UK special Edition of this game on monday and I have to say that I am loving every second of it... It really does take all of the awesome from the first game and knocks it up so many levels. I've never played any game that has an atmospere anywhere near how CoP feels. I have a Core 2 Due 3ghz with 4gb ram and a XFX Geforce 9800gtx+. Running with everything maxed on the sliders, ssao off and the DX10 enhanced dynamic lighting in 1280x1024 and it runs fine for me. The only problem I get is the occasional loading stutter for a second every minute or so as I'm running across the landscape, which I think would be fixed if I just dropped a couple of settings :yes: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waylander Posted February 12, 2010 Author Share Posted February 12, 2010 its on steam now, ?20 or ?15 if you have SoC or CS on steam (which i guess is a lot of people after the christmas deal) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Majesticmerc MVC Posted February 16, 2010 MVC Share Posted February 16, 2010 Funny enough this game runs smooth as hell for me despite everyone else saying otherwise. And I am running most everything at max, 1920 x 1080, and it really is the lighting that kills FPS, but even with the highest lighting settings, I still get over 30 fps. :iiam: To be fair, your machine is an absolute monster, so thats not surprising :p. It runs OK for me 1680x1050 with most settings pretty high. I'm just annoyed that they STILL haven't fixed the goddamn stuttering, which is caused by the games excessive hard disk usage, and has existed in every STALKER game to date :angry:. I have found that the game tends to work well on very specific settings, since I can drop the quality of certain graphics settings and actually get worse performance. I do agree though that the textures the game uses are very... DX8.1 now compared to most other games, but I would assume that's because they've basically bastardizing the same engine for better lighting effects. I heard that they're completely rewriting the engine for STALKER 2, so hopefully STALKER 2 will be pretty pretty pretty :). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntaxError Posted February 19, 2010 Share Posted February 19, 2010 I have an 8400GS and Call of Pripyat ran very well for me. Not a bad game really. Sure the graphics aren't the greatest, but I don't care. I grew up playing monochrome and CGA games, so eye candy really isn't that important to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Treemonkeys Posted February 23, 2010 Share Posted February 23, 2010 I got the UK special Edition of this game on monday and I have to say that I am loving every second of it... It really does take all of the awesome from the first game and knocks it up so many levels. I've never played any game that has an atmospere anywhere near how CoP feels. I have a Core 2 Due 3ghz with 4gb ram and a XFX Geforce 9800gtx+. Running with everything maxed on the sliders, ssao off and the DX10 enhanced dynamic lighting in 1280x1024 and it runs fine for me. The only problem I get is the occasional loading stutter for a second every minute or so as I'm running across the landscape, which I think would be fixed if I just dropped a couple of settings :yes: If you go to the steam forums for this game you will find a mod posted there that tweaks the games prefetch settings, it is supposed to fix the problem you are describing without lowering any graphics settings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanctified Veteran Posted February 23, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 23, 2010 So is this similar to the first one? That's the only one I played back when it was released. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DirtyLarry Veteran Posted February 23, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 23, 2010 So is this similar to the first one? That's the only one I played back when it was released. From the very little I have played it seems almost exactly the same as the first one as far as what you do and how you do it. With that said from what I have seen and read in previews/review this game intentionally has an even greater emphasis on creepy atmosphere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andre S. Veteran Posted February 23, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 23, 2010 The graphics are debatable. Technically, they use all the latest fluff, i.e. fancy parallax maps, volumetric lighting, physics-aware smoke, wet surfaces, hardware tesselation, etc. And there is a consistent visual style that makes the game very atmospheric, though this atmosphere is bleak and oppressing. However a lot of things look just bad. Textures can be low-res on a lot of objects, trees in particuar look nothing like real trees, which today is unacceptable since Oblivion got trees right back in 2006, and the technology that was used is well-known (speedtree). Grass is terrible unless you make it really dense, at which point it's huge drain on framerate. And yeah this thing performs and looks worse than Crysis. Also the quality standards are quite low, like spoken text that doesn't match a word of the subtitles. In the intro most of the spoken dates are one year ahead of what is written in the text, i.e. it says 2006 when the text reads 2005, it's ridiculous. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanctified Veteran Posted February 23, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 23, 2010 From the very little I have played it seems almost exactly the same as the first one as far as what you do and how you do it. With that said from what I have seen and read in previews/review this game intentionally has an even greater emphasis on creepy atmosphere. The graphics are debatable. Technically, they use all the latest fluff, i.e. fancy parallax maps, volumetric lighting, physics-aware smoke, wet surfaces, hardware tesselation, etc. And there is a consistent visual style that makes the game very atmosphere, though this atmosphere is bleak and oppressing. However a lot of things look just bad. Textures can be low-res on a lot of objects, trees in particuar look nothing like real trees, which today is unacceptable since Oblivion got trees right back in 2006, and the technology that was used is well-known (speedtree). Grass is terrible unless you make it really dense, at which point it's huge drain on framerate. And yeah this thing performs and looks worse than Crysis. Also the quality standards are quite low, like spoken text that doesn't match of word of the subtitles. In the intro most of the spoken dates are one year ahead of what is written in the text, i.e. it says 2006 when the text reads 2005, it's ridiculous. How about plotwise? What I loved about the first one was the creepiness and the plot (and the free roaming) Is it possible to run it in DX9 mode? I have a GeForce 8600M GT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andre S. Veteran Posted February 23, 2010 Veteran Share Posted February 23, 2010 About the plot: so far so good, but I only played for a couple of hours. And yeah it runs in DX9, looking about as good as in DX10 and 11. It also scales down very well if you can accept it to look like a game from 2003. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Majesticmerc MVC Posted February 24, 2010 MVC Share Posted February 24, 2010 I think the plot is OK, better than Clear Sky, but not as good as Shadow of Chernobyl. I would go out on a semi-limb and say that CoP is actually quite different from Shadow of Chernobyl. They've sort of taken the best bits of the predecessors and merged them together. In this one They've increased the size of the areas, so they're all pretty big, which means you don't get many of those 90 second loading screens like you used to in SoC, you can run a lot further too, so it doesn't take as long to get places. Another nice thing is that in this game you're a total loner, so you don't have any enemies or friends initially, which makes life much easier since all you have to worry about is killing the mutants and zombies. Weapon advancement is much quicker too, since everyone from the start carries a decent shotgun or an assault rifle, so you don't have to spend hours with a crappy double-barrel shotgun like you did in SoC. They've kept the artifact hunting from Clear Sky, which was one of the few things in the game that I liked a lot, so you need a detector to find artifacts, which makes it hard, but they're also worth a lot of money. You can make a lot of money selling artifacts to interested parties. If you work for one of the artifact dealers, he offers up to 25k for a single artifact, which can go a long way towards upgrading your weapons. You can also identify where artifacts are likely to be created in CoP too, since the anomalies are grouped together, in that there is a place where there are a lot of burner anomalies, and a place where there are a lot of psy-emission anomalies, and so on. Another thing I like is that the areas have central points. In the first two games, things like traders and weapon upgraders were separated, whereas each location in CoP has a central "hub of activity" where you can go to eat, sleep, buy, sell, get work and go to new locations. You can't go between areas on your own any more, you need the help of a guide, which actually works pretty well since you don't have to go trekking for miles to get to the next area. My only complaint aside from the s****y textures is that the plot lacks a bit of direction. In SoC you had a single objective, and the game told you where you needed to go to achieve it, whereas in CoP, I don't really feel like I'm progressing very quickly. I was quite skeptical with my first few steps into the game, the graphics are quite outdated now, and the plot does lack direction, but the game itself is pretty good once you get into it in my opinion, and very much worth the money I spent on it :) EDIT: With regard to the DX9 thing, like Dr_Asik said, there is a DX9 mode, however I found that running the game in DX10 mode actually resulted in better performance than DX9 mode, so if you've got a DX10 graphics card, you'd be better off in DX10 mode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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