The game STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl at the start encountered a large number of bugs and errors in the operation of game systems, but its optimization, taking into account the work of the project on Unreal Engine 5, turned out to be at a fairly good level. This is especially true for versions for Xbox Series X consoles | S, which show stable performance at 30 FPS, plus on the older console there is the ability to enable 60 frames per second, and they look good with VRR.
The developers of STALKER 2 spoke in an interview with tech4gamers about optimizing the game for the Xbox Series S. The journalists asked how difficult it was to adapt the project for Microsoft’s junior console. According to game director Evgeniy Grigorovich, consoles, including the Series S, have advantages over PCs, plus the Xbox team provided significant support:
The first thing to say is that Xbox offers a significant advantage over PC: it is one standard hardware configuration that all players have. This is beneficial if you carefully study the characteristics and device. Even simple tweaks can provide significant performance improvements.
Microsoft also provided us with great support not only in optimizing STALKER 2 for Xbox Series X | S, but also in other areas such as development best practices and sharing useful knowledge. Advanced Technology Group worked closely with us, providing real-time assistance as if they were part of our team. Our most productive collaboration happened when they visited our office to test, profile and troubleshoot the game, helping us find solutions. They also helped us decide on the best approach to crash reporting, whether through a separate process, thread, or in-game integration.
Luckily, we were able to focus on optimizations in the later stages of development, using Xbox Series S as the primary target for performance measurements. Our guiding principle was simple: if something didn’t work on Series S, we reconsidered the solution.
We’ve also optimized CPU usage using simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) and fine-tuning threads for gaming, rendering, and background tasks.
Let us remind you that on Xbox Series S consoles, STALKER 2 runs in the original resolution from 648p to 864p with scaling up to 1080p, at 30 FPS.
