Shadows – reflections and pop-in fix
Just my personal engine.ini tweaks to fix the game shadows, reflections and reduce pop-in issues.
Installation Steam version:
Copy the engine.ini into C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\Config\Windows
Installation GamePass version:
Copy the engine.ini into C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\Config\WinGDK
Under the [TextureStreaming] section in the engine.ini find the line r.Streaming.PoolSize and set it acordingly to you GPU VRAM.
If you have 24GB use 18432, for 16GB use 12288, for 12GB use 9216, for 11GB use 8192, for 10GB use 7168, for 8GB use 6144.
What does this mod does?
1. Fixes the blurry and low quality reflections
2. Fixes the shadows draw distance, so no more ugly, low quality and flickering distant shadows
3. Increases shadows resolution, so shadows are much nicer and much less flickering
4. Massively increases draw distance of trees and other vegetation, which reduces the pop in issues to the minimum
5. Disables terrible bloom effect and reduces the terrible auto exposure effect, making the transition faster and less agressive
6. Also added some optimization and stability tweaks
Note that this tweaks pushes the game visuals even further then whats vanilla max settings, so be prepared to lose some FPS, therefore I really recommend using this tweaks only for high end GPUs.
Me myself having 4080S and playing at 1440p Epic settings. With this tweaks, DLSS quality and FG enabled I am getting around 90-100FPS in Zalissya, with DLAA and FG around 70-80FPS. In 4k most cards besides 4090 will probably struggle. Yes its very tanky, but its not a performance mod, its a visuals mod, so the FPS loss is expected and intended. I personally gladly take this tradeoff for how much better the game looks with those tweaks.
If you want to increase performance, you can lower the shadows resolution.
Default values are:
r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=16384
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=8192
You can tone it down to:
r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=8192/4096
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=4096
You will gain some FPS with that, the shadows will still look much better then vanilla, but if you get close, you will still see them flickering quite a bit.
What I still havent found fix for is the terrible ghosting, noise and other visual artifacts this game sadly has plenty of. If anyone has some fix for it please share it, I will very much appreciate it.
Hope you will like the new looks of the game.
