Lighting Comparison

As anyone who has played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on an older graphics card will tell you, one of the most significant settings that can reduce performance is to turn on the game’s full dynamic lighting mode. According to the game’s manual, the “static lighting” mode runs the game in DX8 mode, while the two dynamic lighting modes run under DX9. We took the following screenshots on a Radeon X1350 XT to compare static to full dynamic lighting:

Static lighting

Full dynamic lighting

Static lighting

Full dynamic lighting

Static lighting

Full dynamic lighting

Static lighting

Full dynamic lighting

To demonstrate the profound impact full dynamic lighting can make on performance, we also ran benchmarks with the Radeon X1350 XT and GeForce 6800 GS under both static lighting and full dynamic lighting. We used the following user.ltx text file for our static lighting testing, and this user.ltx file for our dynamic lighting testing.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Direct3D

As you can see, enabling S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s dynamic lighting mode crushed the fps of our cards. With the static lighting mode running several times faster for the ATI and NVIDIA GPUs we tested.

We should note that some users have discovered a way to turn on bloom lighting via the game’s “r2_ls_bloom_fast on” command. You then use the “r2_ls_bloom_threshold” setting to adjust intensity with smaller numbers yielding brighter intensity. We haven’t had a chance to test this out yet though.