I could have sworn I had commented on this news post already, but there is nothing here???
Those system specs are surprisingly reasonable for a new title in 2024.
This is possibly due to it being delayed so many times, but still, that is nice to see.
A friend of mine who just like me really loved the original STALKER series has since had two daughters and kind of got busy and stopped playing games. He hasn't upgraded his desktop in well over a decade at this point.
This is the title that might make him do it. I was doing some research and catching him up on the latest in PC hardware, and he - (previously a PC hardware enthusiast like myself) was pleased to find out he might be able to do so relatively affordable between a MicroCenter bundle, and a cheap GPU with these reasonable specs.
Heck, apart from all being the "higher VRAM versions" of their models, even the recommended GPU specs are pretty light by modern standards:
RX 5700 XT 8GB, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8GB, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB. I would have expected these to be minimum specs, not "recommended".
This suggests to me that RT either won't be in the game at all, or at least won't be a huge deal.
I mean, a 5700xt is a 6 year old mid range GPU. It is equivalent in performance to a 6600xt.
The lowest end of AMD's current generation (RX 7600, non-XT) outperforms the 5700xt by ~10%.
So, the lowest end consumer GPU AMD currently sells for $269 officially (though with a quick search they can be had for as low as $239 online, probably less with more searching) is ~10% above recommended specs and about 2.3x faster than the minimum spec RX580...
When the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Shadow of Chernobyl launched in 2007, recommended specs were a Core 2 Duo E6400, and a DX9 GPU with at least 256MB of VRAM (they mentioned GeForce 7900, but don't specify which one, and ATI Radeon x1850, a model that isn't even listed on the AMD GPU wikipedia list).
Either way, those were reasonable ~1 year old mid range systems when the original launched. This is significantly lower than that.
While I think this is pretty cool, I also hope it is not a bad sign when it comes to the quality of the game.
I had worried that I may have to upgrade in order to enjoy this one at 4k, but I suspect the Threadripper 3960x and GeForce RTX 4090 will be just fine.
Heck, even if it looks like a game from 5 years ago, I am cool with that. That is still a decade newer than the originals, and if they have a similar vibe as those, I bet it will still be a great game.
