Nvidia’s Stalker 2 Benchmarks suggest that it may be CPU-limited, but DLSS 3 appears to make a huge difference at 4K

Stalker 2, the next installment in the Stalker series, is almost upon us. andupdated requirements are also available (how many times has that happened? We now know how the game will run, at least based on Nvidia's estimates.

In a blog posting announcing DLSS 3 in Stalker 2, Nvidia shares its own benchmarks of some RTX-40-series graphics card. It compares the average frame rates of the GPUs in 1080p and 1440p resolutions, as well as 4K, with and without DLSS 3.

What are the main takeaways from this? Nvidia's benchmarks aren't perfect, but the game should still run well. It looks great. We're talking about 60 fps on max settings in 1080p or 1440p, with an RTX 4000 and above. To be more precise, the 4070 averages 1.2 fps below this at 1440p. This is without DLSS 3 being enabled.

Nvidia claims that Stalker 2 will run at over 70 fps on an RTX 4160 Ti at 1440p and at over 120 fps on an RTX 400 Ti Super. The real gains come at 4K where we see gains of over 2x. The RTX 4080 Super for example, jumps from 47.1 fps in average to 112.7 fps with DLSS 3 at 4K.

As we move from 4K to 1080p or, to a lesser degree, 1440p, the frame rate plateaus with the higher-end graphics cards (DLSS 3 disabled). This is true for the RTX 4070Ti Super and above and possibly even the RTX 4070Super.

We would expect frame rates at lower resolutions to plateau, as games become less GPU-bound, and more CPU-bound as the number of pixels displayed decreases. The extent of the leveling out and the fact that the RTX4070 is a little higher on the GPU list and that the RTX4070 also starts to level out at 1080p, are enough to make you suspect that Stalker 2 may be CPU-bound.

We can't be sure yet, but these are Nvidia figures, not ours.

The use of Lumen for global illumination instead of ray tracing could make Stalker more CPU-dependent. Lumen is software-based, and it relies heavily on the CPU. It can be lower quality and cause flickering, but it is still better than ray-tracing.

These initial benchmarks are promising, whether you use Lumen or CPU-bound. This is at least a little consolation in light of the new system requirements. 160 GB of storage and 16 GB RAM are the two biggest.