Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl was a big highlight of E3 2021 for many of you. Although the radiation-contaminated Open World will not appear until the spring of next year, the developers have over the Steam page of the game and the official homepage now reveal the system requirements.
If you missed the E3 trailer, you can watch it again here – it promises a zone feeling in its purest form for the finished game:
5:03
Stalker 2: First gameplay brings back memories of old times
The system requirements of Stalker 2
If you want to deal with mutants, bandits and anomalies again next year, you need an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 (6 GB) or an AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB) as a minimum, according to the Steam website.
Fortunately, GameStar readers rarely have to worry in this regard, at least with a view to our latest GPU survey: According to its results, most of you should be able to meet the game’s minimum GPU requirements.
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The recommended system specifications call for significantly more: A Ryzen 7 3700X or a Core i7 9700K is named as the CPU. As a graphics card, you should have something on the level of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super or GTX 1080 Ti in your computer.
But Stalker 2 is not only hungry for performance, it also eats up a lot of space on the hard drive: you need it 150 GB of storage space.
At the same time, it is noticeable that an SSD is already mentioned in the minimum requirements on Steam. The information on the official stalker site
The system requirements at a glance:
Minimum
- Operating system: Windows 10
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X / Intel Core i5-7600K
- Random access memory: 8 GByte RAM
- Graphic card: AMD Radeon RX 580 (8,0 GByte) / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6,0 GByte)
- Storage space: 150 GByte
Recommended
- Operating system: Windows 10
- processor: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X / Intel Core i7 9700K
- Random access memory: 16 GByte RAM
- Graphic card: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT / NVIDIA Geforce RTX 2070 SUPER / NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080 Ti
- Storage space: 150 GByte
Expert assessment by our hardware editor Nils Raettig: At first glance, the system requirements of Stalker 2 on Steam don’t sound that high considering the very impressive look from the first gameplay trailer. However, one important factor should not be forgotten: ray tracing.
The officially recommended graphics cards include two models that do not offer hardware acceleration for ray tracing – so it can be assumed that the previous information does not take this factor into account. If you want to enjoy the game in all its glory, you will very likely have to assume significantly higher requirements again.
How big the optical difference will be with and without ray tracing remains to be seen, of course. In terms of lighting, however, Stalker 2 could set a new benchmark. If ray tracing is used well, I am willing to accept high system requirements, especially since they can potentially be lowered again by DLSS and / or AMD’s Fidelity FX Super Resolution.
According to current plans, Stalker 2 will be released in less than a year, more precisely on 28. April 2022 be ready. Besides the PC, the release is only planned for the Xbox Series X / S. As in the case of the Bethesda title Starfield, PlayStation players will have to do without the title.
