Two of the most hotly anticipated games are slated to arrive next week: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Both will be under our microscope for performance, and the GPU companies are already gearing up for the releases. Nvidia has Game Ready driver 566.14 with support for both titles, and it also patches several issue, including the infamous Corsair iCUE CPU utilization bug.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is the sequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which debuted in 2007. The second game is a hybrid first-person shooter, immersive sim, and horror game all wrapped into one. The game takes advantage of Unreal Engine 5, potentially giving the game excellent visual fidelity and graphical realism — and perhaps inevitably the performance issues and bugs that Uneal Engine 5 is known for.
The game heads back to the Chornobyl reactor and surrounding environment, inspired by the real-life nuclear disaster that took place at the Chornobyl plant — paired with a fictional story and timeline. The game takes place in a 64 km squared open world centered around Chornobyl full of radiation, mutants, and anomalies. The story has several different paths set by in-game decisions, enabling the player to make their own story.
The system requirements look somewhat tame, though we have to wonder what level of performance they target. You'll need at least an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X or Intel Core i7-7700K processor, 16GB of memory, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB, or Intel Arc A750 graphics card. You'll also want 160GB (!) of SSD storage.
Recommended system specs are quite a bit higher: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X or Intel Core i7-11700, 32GB of memory, and either an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070. And 160GB of SSD storage still.
How will the game run? We'll do our own testing as soon as we're able, but in the interim Nvidia has provided some benchmarks, showcasing both native and DLSS 3 performance as usual:
Nvidia benchmarks reveal that, just like every other Unreal Engine 5 title, the game is incredibly taxing on even the best graphics cards at maximum settings if you don't take advantage of performance enhancers including upscaling and frame generation.
At 4k maximum settings, the RTX 4090 doesn't even hit 60 FPS, delivering just 52.4 FPS average with DLSS off. Nvidia's mid range RTX 4070 Super barely surpasses the 30 FPS mark, with 34.7 FPS average. Turning on With DLSS performance mode upscaling and frame generation helps the RTX 4090 to reach 123 FP, and the RTX 4070 Super gets 87 FPS.
Stepping down to 1440p and 1080p naturally makes things quite a bit less difficult, in terms of hardware. At native resolution with DLSS off, the RTX 4090 achieved 74.8 FPS and 85.5 FPS, respectively. With DLSS on (this time with quality mode upscaling), the RTX 4090 hits 145 and 166 FPS, and the RTX 4070 Super and other Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs all hit playable levels as well.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 doesn't have any benchmarks yet, but it's the company's next iteration of its class-leading flight sim. The game comes with a big focus on player career, with multiple career options including shipping, chartering, racing, and more. The game will ship with the full brunt of Nvidia features: DLSS 3, DLAA, ray tracing, and Reflex.
Minimum system requirements consist of an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K processor, 16GB RAM, a Radeon RX 5700 or GeForce GTX 970 GPU, 50GB of disk space, and at least a 10 Mbps internet connection. Recommended specs list an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X or Intel Core i7-10700K, 32GB RAM, Radeon RX 5700 XT or GeForce RTX 2080, still 50GB of storage, and a 50 Mbps or faster internet connection.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl comes out November 20th while MSFS 2024 comes out a day earlier on November 19th.
Nvidia's 566.14 drivers also mark the end of the road for GeForce Experience and the Nvidia Control Panel, at least in terms of updates and bug fixes. The Nvidia App has reached the full release milestone (version 11.0.1 technically) and now takes over from GFE and NCP.
What about AMD and Intel drivers for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Flight Simulator 2024? They're not available yet, though we suspect there's a good chance both will push out updates before next week.
