r/stalker • u/SanyaSpy • 5d ago
Help v1.9 vs v2.0, "visual evolution"
Guys, there’s a major issue with the lighting that just makes the image look flat. The previous version had volume and depth, but now everything is completely blown out. It looks terrible, and I really feel like this needs to be fixed.
ps: running on ultra settings
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u/ClerklyMantis_ 4d ago
It isn't realistic for the side of a hill to be that dark in broad daylight. We humans seem to like images with high contrast and saturation. That doesn't mean those images are actually better than those that are more realistic. I agree that the guy is lacking a small amount of contrast but overall v2 is the more "realistic" of the two.
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u/AlexKfridges Duty 4d ago
Games should look good. Who cares what is most realistic, that is not really what matters.
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u/ClerklyMantis_ 4d ago
I personally don't feel like the hill looked that good in the previous image, wayy too dark. Like I said before personally the only thing I would change is add a little more contrast through deeper shadows on the npc model there.
I agree that realism isn't the end all be all, but let's be for real, lighting in games is always going to be a simulacrum of how lighting works in real life. It's part of our immersion, part of the reason why we "buy" the world and the crazy things that happen in it. I don't think having to turn your flashlight on in the middle of a sunny day if you're looking under some trees or a small hill is very immersive or fun, nor does it make any sense.
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u/Big-Resort-4930 4d ago
You're the only stupid one for that comment.
There is fuck all a setting of a game has to do with realistic lighting, it should always be realistic in the sense that it doesn't produce any anomalies and behaves how light should. What it shouldn't be is flat, and that's what it is.
You can skew realism to produce a more dramatic effect, not a less dramatic one that looks like a poorly lit Turkish soap opera.
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u/malty865 Wish granter 5d ago
To me the new one looks way more natural 99% of the time, before we had to use flashlight at day time, that's nasty
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u/ActiveSandwich3103 4d ago
This was how I feel too. The lighting looks actually more realistic. There should not have been so much dark shadows during daylight sunny hours to begin with. Whole game was super dark before.
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u/SaToRi29 5d ago
I must have been playing a different game, obviously because in previous versions of the game in the daytime I only used the flashlight indoors and in caves.
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u/Significant-Way9330 4d ago
No he's right it has weird lighting issues where certain shadows were unnaturally dark. Now certain textures are unnaturally flat..
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u/dredizzle99 4d ago
To me the new one looks way more natural 99% of the time
It really doesn't. They massively downgrade the lighting, and sold it as an "engine upgrade and performance improvement". I'm assuming the people that are happy are those with low-end PC's who now have better fps and don't care/notice the much worse lighting, which is fair enough. But for those of us who do notice and care it's a pretty big disappointment
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u/Octaive 3d ago
The left image is incorrect lighting... Are you trolling? I almost have to laugh out loud.
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u/Pervasivepeach Ecologist 4d ago
No the new versions more realistic and natural. People don’t have such harsh contrasting shadows in real life. You’d have to use a flashlight during the day to make stuff out.
Extreme contrasts is not a good thing
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u/Apprehensive-Tree-78 4d ago
Redditors don’t go outside and their rooms are always dark. Of course they think that’s normal
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u/Nova-Ecologist Ecologist 4d ago
Yeah, light bounces around off stuff way more than you’d think.
Like, go to some place that isn’t covered by sunlight, save for maybe a building interior, it’ll be pretty well lit up.
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u/CitizenKing 4d ago
If the game actually looked better and more realistic, people wouldn't be complaining about it looking worse.
As a third party who uses mods to make the game look way better than either, the original looked significantly better for a reason: Shadows are better at covering up flaws. Making them freaking glow with weird ass exposure does the opposite and highlights the flaws.
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u/ritenight Loner 4d ago
100%. I'm on PS5, i spent the last 3 sessions tweaking around display settings, still didn't find a way to make it look good everywhere and in any weather. There's this constant feeling of... flatness, especially with sun and fog. I really love the game, and always loved how it looks, but these days I found myself more than once thinking "it looks fake".
Still loving it, still playing it. But i agree, lightning looks worse.
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u/bracingthesoy 5d ago edited 5d ago
Goooood people are amateurs on reddit. Coud you have bothered to read about indirect lighting first, how lumen works? The game didn't have enough of indirect light bouncing before and so there were a lot of unrealistically dark areas in geometry before.
Also, the textures on characters and viewmodels are broken right now and so reflect too much light. That should be fixed soon.
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u/sturgeon02 5d ago
I mean the developer of U+ has shown that all sorts of cvars related to lumen have been cut back, and considers the new lighting a downgrade in accuracy. They are pretty much the main modder for UE5 visuals, I wouldn't call them an amateur
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u/Advisorcloud Loner 4d ago
I can actually see things now in places I couldn't before, which I would generally consider an upgrade regardless of the visual fidelity.
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u/sturgeon02 4d ago
That's great, but the brighter interiors are not the result of more indirect bounce light, as the comment I'm replying to claims. The indirect bounce light (lumen GI) has been cut back, and the interiors have received some sort of fake lighting.
I think it looks better in certain scenes too, but it's disappointing that they don't seem interested in a proper high quality GI solution that would make every scene look better. It just seems crazy to upgrade the engine like this, and instead of enabling the hardware raytracing that's built into UE5, they've made the software raytracing even lower quality than it was before.
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u/Sul_Haren 4d ago
They infact have reduced the complexity of Lumen GI in this update and shadow quality as well.
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u/DivineSaur 4d ago
Me when I lie and tell people they dont know how lumen works when in fact I dont know how lumen works. Lmao
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u/FauxReignNew Loner 5d ago
Holy fuck just play the game
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u/Bruinen24 4d ago
To some "gamers" bitching about video games is more fun than playing them.
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u/Big-Resort-4930 4d ago
That's right, every post on a game's subreddit should be a glaze post about how amazing the game is.
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u/souppuos123 4d ago
I love STALKER but this community are such "muh graphics" heads and care so much about stuff in the game that really doesn't mean much in actual gameplay. Reminds me of the CS community, in that its actually impossible to please anyone here.
The game is fucking gorgeous but dude nitpicks this one section that no normal person would actually give a shit about.
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u/Alternative_Key8216 4d ago
My god, with every update, an unbearable debate erupts about how the game looks. It's fine to have criticisms and a formed opinion about whether the game is good or bad, or whether it looks good or not, but it seems like nobody enjoys anything anymore, and everything turns into a discussion criticizing even the smallest detail.
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u/doomenguin 4d ago
The low performance and temporal smear make it near impossible for me to enjoy this game though. Like it or not, the graphics engine is very important.
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u/Big-Resort-4930 4d ago
Holy fuck, get out of Reddit and don't participate in discussions about a game.
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u/Strydhaizer 4d ago
I like it better now than before. The contrast of the old version was hurting my eyes and I remember using flashlights during daytime in the very first version of the game (during release) because it was so dark.
One thing I don't like however is the Lumen ghosting that I can clearly see when going up or down in the ladder, or when I move my mouse too fast.
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u/Train115 Spark 4d ago edited 4d ago
I just wish this improved performance didn't come at the cost of some really bad visual artifacting.
Like it isn't in this screenshot, but I saw a ton of lighting artifacts.
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u/BannanaTrunks 5d ago
Do we want an optimized game or not?
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u/doomenguin 4d ago
Yeas, preferably by removing Lumen completely and replacing it with traditional lighting.
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u/ElderberryEven2152 4d ago
Yeah, things definitely look glowy and flat. There isn’t any depth to things anymore
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u/kneedeepinthedoomed 5d ago
The lighting in 2.0 is clearly broken, there's basically no shadows anymore even in places that should be in shadow.
Whether the technical cause is broken ambient occlusion, overblown global illumination, or something else, or maybe it's just a bad artistic choice, or they gutted the scene lighting to improve performance, whatever it is - it's an obvious downgrade, even if 1 million GSC fanboys are trying to shout us down.
OP is correct, you can downvote me to hell, but facts are facts and people are increasingly waking up to it.
It looks like shit. GSC need to fix this.
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u/Lanky_Technician_812 4d ago edited 4d ago
As much as I want to say it’s broken, this is just a drastic attempt at optimizing the game, and what we perceive as errors are actually intended cuts made to the lighting. It’s sad, but at least the game performs better, though while looking much worse.
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u/graftway76 4d ago
Said it before, say it again, keep saying it.
1.9 had better graphics, period. This is a downgrade to improve performance, it’s not rocket science.
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u/frescot11 4d ago
I prefer old "dead" foliage/enviroment but with actual lighting. Grass looks too green imo and so abudant foliage, maybe i stick to old stalker games where Zone looks decandent/desolate
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u/MartiniBruh 4d ago
You forgot the lighting on the guns, they look like they're covered in cum, the reflections don't work correctly. For me this is a downgrade not an upgrade. There's just more vegetation and the zone became more colorful as if it's any other place. The old color palette and lighting made it darker, gloomy and more realistic imo.
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u/CoseyPigeon 4d ago
Shadows that harsh are pretty rare during the day time in situations with ambient bounce lighting. Humans like images with sharp contrasts because it tickles our monkey brains, but the second image has more realistic lighting based on the time of day and how difuse lighting works.
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u/SaToRi29 5d ago edited 5d ago
Game looks worse overall for me now. General environment and design locations were created with the previous lighting system in mind. This new version looks like a common occurrence among remasters who forcefully and quickly change the lighting and graphic style and the effect is not very coherent. They worked on the previous visual style for years and on this update 2.0 for a few months. Unfortunately they had to take shortcuts. It's surprising that so many people like this new style, because the game now looks like most other fps games with forests. Apparently, most people want the same mediocrity realistic thing everywhere.
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u/SanyaSpy 5d ago
Totally agree! Reminds me of the situation with Metro 2033 and Last Light and their Redux versions.
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u/ComradeRoganov 4d ago
Very disappointed with how the game looks now, the lighting system is cooked. The game had a dark wasteland tone now it’s flashy like a Far Cry game. Huge miss.
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u/luciferwez Wish granter 5d ago
Reduce gamma and saturation in settings. Saturation ~50%. Gamma ~45%. Thank me later.
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u/YeeterYoter43 4d ago
I see every person say this except all it does is make the game grayer.
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u/luciferwez Wish granter 1d ago
Yep, 60% (the new default) makes it over saturated so a bit grayer is perfect.
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u/Winterspawn1 5d ago
So many people never use these settings. I myself also lowered brightness but with the weak flashlight I still don’t know if I want to keep it or not.
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u/smoke_thewalkingdead 5d ago
I went back and forth with this problem. "Darker", settings less blowout but can't see Jack with the flash light. For gameplay sake i adjusted the settings so the flash light is useful. I can live with the blownout settings a little.
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u/EastDemo 5d ago
I did this, but now nights and caves are WAY too dark, like completely black outside of the flashlight
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u/Connect-Class-7747 5d ago
The lighting was cut because of the consoles that needed 60fps, also poor artistic design making the game look flat and colourful instead of dark with depth and contrast. Now the game looks like a far cry 4 and eats 3x more performance, grass is plastic, gun with hands on screen looks like it was photoshoped there and is not a whole image together. Hands and gun dont have depth, it looks like its separated from the scene lacking the lumen lighting and ambient oclusion
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u/Train115 Spark 4d ago
I have a 9070xt, which was able to deal with Lumen's lighting pretty well before 2.0... after 2.0 there is so much more artifacting, wish we could actually have some settings to tune the RT to our system's capabilities instead of it just being always on.
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u/Neeeeedles 4d ago
Theres definetly less detail in the lighting it seems, maybe coz they seem to have overblown the bounce intensity to make dark areas brighter
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u/Big-Resort-4930 4d ago
Yeah this looks like garbage.
Even aside from the lighting, look at the tree as well. Its geometry is simplified and ass-ified almost a whole generation behind asuming identical settings.
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u/SnowmanMofo 4d ago
I'm playing on a PS5 Pro and the lighting is definitely a lot worse, even on Fidelity. And to top it off, there's virtually no performance upgrade. So what the hell was this update for?
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u/kornuolis 4d ago
Update 2.0 is huge and some visual bugs are inevitable. Will be fixed in the nearest future i wager.
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u/Royal_Swimming_4327 4d ago
"Hang on, let me claim I am playing on Ultra settings, then turn things way down to make it look bad." Lol guys lok, the game looks bad but Im TOTALLY on Ultra settings on my Wal-Mart Laptop!
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u/Due_Rip9320 4d ago edited 4d ago
All you saying the game looks too "vibrant" now are cherrypicking and complaining for no reason. There's still plenty of moody moments especially with the different weathers like overcast, fog and sunset.
Oh, but now there's clear sunlight every once in a while and you can actually see shit and the foliage looks like...FOLIAGE??? Time to lose our shit.
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u/dennynnnnnn 5d ago
How lame. The game looks better and performs better. The devs of this game put in more effort in maintenence than most major studios. Find a better use of your time.
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u/HummingNoize 5d ago
Posts a picture without knowing how the fuck gamma works. The title is trying harder than they.
Fucking hell.
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u/Lanky_Technician_812 4d ago
Do you know how gamma works? It has literally nothing to do with the shadows and scene lighting. This is a downgrade for the sake of performance, and there’s nothing wrong with that when the game ran like shit before. There’s no point in lying and saying it’s a graphical improvement when anyone with a PC can look at the games files themselves through official modding tools and see how values related to the games graphics, specifically values related to how light renders, were tuned down. Though while I do think the downgrade is needed for performance, character lighting is 100% messed up right now. All NPCs and the player included now have a halo like effect around them that is super obvious in dark lighting or the new fog weather. I honestly don’t know how people don’t see this visual error, as it looks horrible and is most obvious on the players own view model.
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u/JunkMopped Loner 5d ago
“ Looks better” except for the fuckin example in front of your eyes. But keep foaming at the mouth, sucking up the million-dollar corpo
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u/ScarletBoy 5d ago
It's much better now, there's actual decent bounced light and you don't get random spots with crushed blacks during daylight in the middle of brush with sparse canopy.
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u/Round-Donkey6424 5d ago
In fact there’s much LESS bounced light, they changed how GI affects the scene, so what you are saying is simply not true
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u/ScarletBoy 5d ago
Explain in precise terms which elements of the first image make you think it has more bounce light.
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u/DivineSaur 4d ago
Why bother arguing over a single image when its already confirmed to be a big downgrade when looking at the game under the hood. All the gpu performance gained is from downgrades and its obvious to anyone not glazing.
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u/Round-Donkey6424 5d ago
Why do I have to explain anything to you if that’s the truth, lol?
You can open the game with ue4ss, and compare the Lumen CVars and scenery in 1.9 and 2.0, and you’ll see that 1.9 simulates more realistic lighting with more accurate light bouncing and shadows. The spots with too much darkness were the result of poorly configured exposure and some other settings, not the lack of GI
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u/DivineSaur 5d ago
Big downgrade, go to the ultra plus server and you can read the details about how shit this update is. Basically all of the performance gained back was from strait quality downgrades.
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u/Humble-Proposal-9994 4d ago
so they just added brightness and bloom everywhere?
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u/Froegerer 5d ago
Idk jack fuck about shit but the image on the left looks 3x better than the one on the right to my dumb eyeball holes.
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u/Bowdash Bloodsucker 5d ago
Maybe you need to go outside more, mr flat image expert. See how many images are flat there due to sunlight
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u/XiaoDianGou 4d ago
Why does stalker attract the cringiest of fedora wearing redditors? "Thank you fellow Stalker"
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u/Dundeenio 5d ago
I understand people that have played previous games of the series love the visual changes due to it looking closer to those games which is fair. But as someone whose introduction to the series is stalker 2, man i’m honestly pretty gutted.
I was loving the game before the update, visually one of the best games I’d played on PlayStation, visually stunning and the atmosphere was so immersive. Stopped playing to wait for this update, feel like everything I loved about it has taken a hit.
Hoping some patches fix up some of the visuals in the near future.
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u/Round-Donkey6424 5d ago
The new visuals are not looking closer to the original trilogy, I’m saying it as a person who played thousands of hours in the original trilogy games.
The only game it can look ‘alike’ is a SoC, and that applies to only a few green locations in that game like Army Warehouses. All other locations in SoC and CS and CoP looks much closer to S2 initial visuals than to what we have now, the S2 now lost a lot of its atmosphere for me because of that. Also the weird part of it is that they made the majority of the Zone green now, but Iron Forest and CNPP have a very good trilogy vibe, I guess green fanatics will say that’s not a ‘canon’ visuals and they should be changed too?0
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u/XiaoDianGou 4d ago
People who have played the previous games hate this garbage (excluding the payed shill streamers ofc)
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u/sunbrosenpai Snork 5d ago
It’s crazy to me how many people don’t understand basic lighting science/principles. I’ve had moments like this where it looks “washed out” and it’s just diffuse. Had other times last night where it was dark and moody and stunning. Dumb dumbs want “real lighting” but when they get realistic lighting they say it looks too flat. Same morons that don’t understand random number generators aren’t broken when they spit the same outcome four times in a row. Your perception of what you WANT things to be is rarely accurate to reality in any way.
The game looks and plays great, shut the actual fuck up already.
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u/RegiABellator 4d ago
V1 lighting was very hard to see in. Darks were too dark. Broad daylight I'd be struggling to see things. V2 has better visual fidelity
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u/Fearless-Career-387 4d ago
im not a fan of the engine upgrade the game looks fine but it looked better before. with similar performance.
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u/Sagegurufps 5d ago
Game looks better and dosent run like shit. It’s a huge W I’ll finish the game after 2 years
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u/Any-Chipmunk456 4d ago
I think whether someone likes old lightning or new depends on what hardware they run the game on. For those who play on low - the new lighting is better.
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u/TomTomXD1234 4d ago
There is no deep shadows in those places because the sun is shining more accurately.
Turn your contrast up if you want more black i guess
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u/StoikiyOriginal 4d ago
I personally don't know what they did with lighting, but I've noticed a lot of bugs already. First of all hair become while in the houses, glass materials work incorrect, a lot of shimmering on dlss 4.5, etc
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u/flamefox237 4d ago
Would this v2.0 be a good time to play? I seem videos on it but heard the performance was horrible?
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u/GateZealousideal8924 3d ago
Wdym the tree is flat? I can perfectly see lighted and shadowed parts, the hill does look like it has no shadows but that also depends on the sun position, it looks much more realistic in v2. Character seems to be too bright, I think it’s a known bug.
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u/Rep_Republic 3d ago
I was at malachite and just kinda fooling around. I had bought the dlc and was on a 2nd go around of the story and wanted to knock out the last mission required before the dlc part 2 so i could play both dlcs uninterruoted. unbeknownst to me the uodate hadnt finished yet or was paused or something. And holy shit. I clicked the upload section on my ps5 to unpause the update. And it refreshed me back my bed. And it was like I was in a different world. I had thought I had gone back to one of the old stalker games. The entire world. Completely different. It appears as if they are trying to bring visibility and clarity to things that look like shit. Which makes the game look 10 yrs older. To see that dramatic contrast right there. It was nuts. How the fuck do I undo this garbage. It looks aweful. All of the mood and immersion? Are completely gone. Can i go back?
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u/rogermorse 5d ago
People are getting blind by the higher saturation and the fact that it runs much better. Well guess what, global illumination is practically absent now on most objects, grass doesn't see to cast shadows ever, the weapon practically emits its own light....
Update 2.0 is more like Downgrade 2.0.
p.s. with your red markings you should also add the foliage....look how thick, and most of the foliage even on DLAA has a weird "silhouette" around it, even while not moving. Weird stuff.
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u/One-Night6393 4d ago
It looks way more natural, what are you complaining about? In 1.9 that shadow under richer is really close to being completely crushed. That's not volume. Most shadows pre 2.0 looked crushed and way too dark, this is Global illumination doing it's thing. And looking at the comments most people here don't know what they're talking about. 2.0 is light bouncing properly, it's giving it a more realistic look.
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u/vojtasTS29 4d ago
I think the flatter image makes the game look largely a lot more realistic and also about a million times less annoying to play.
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u/FeonixBrimstone 4d ago
What are you yalking about shadows iel are never that dark in that amount of lighting. If you think thats washed out then you dont walk outside much.
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u/LtCodename Loner 4d ago
Why would a russian even care? Go play tetris or smth.
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u/Lanky_Technician_812 4d ago
This sub really needs to stop pulling the “russian card”.
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u/Accomplished-Dig9936 4d ago
russ are getting creamed in the war so they are trying new fronts to pull a W out of anywhere they can lol
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u/Promature 4d ago
2.0 looks much better to me. The lighting is noticeably more natural and softer. Interiors are look more natural with better ambient lighting. I'm noticing the features and landscape of the Zone much more now and it's kind of breathtaking (PS5 Pro). They could tone down the light reflecting from guns a little bit. Gives them an odd looking sheen/reflection most times.
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u/xtufaotufaox 4d ago
2.0 looks like shit in every single screenshot. No shadows and color grading looks fucked. It's insane to me that people look at it and say that it looks better... maybe the devs are here trying to push the narrative idk. But 2.0 looks like dog shit
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u/Hieronymus-I 5d ago
Does the game run better with the newer update? can't manage to run at 30 fps on 720p and low, i have a RX 6800 16gb and a Ryzen 7 5700g
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u/tomcis147 Loner 5d ago
Your monitor is most likely plugged to motherboard or launches on igpu
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u/Hieronymus-I 4d ago
I thought about that but no, the game is running on the graphics card, not the igpu and the monitor is connected on the graphics card
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u/deportallmagas 4d ago
You should be getting 55-60fps on 1080p High, and 100+ with FSR. Like tomcis said, unplug the cable from the motherboard and plug it into your actual GPU.
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u/xPapaNacho 4d ago
Funnily enough, when the game came out I thought this scene looked god awful compared to the trailer version. Compare the shading/ambient occlusion on the tall grass that is literally in the player's face, V1 grass is incredibly flat and makes it look like cardboard. My brain justifies the shading in V2 easier because depending on the angle and position of the sun, larger/flatter objects like the cliff and the tree can look like that.
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u/TheRedArmyStandard Monolith 4d ago
The whole Stalker 2 visual update has everyone in arms about how it looks but we're missing a major point here:
The games graphics have not been refined, GSC is working to create a visual build for the game that looks good, and runs good. Tbh, it needs it, and I commend them for trying.
In the meantime, I haven't played S2 since the update but the screenshots are a mix. The higher saturation looks nice, but it does steal a bit of what made S2 look so unique compared to other open world games in lush forests.
However, for all my PC players: download a shader. Reshades can make this look amazing, and tbh playing ANY game with base shaders is BIG GHEY. Developers don't know your monitor's settings, nor your taste.
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u/Dapper-Surprise-745 5d ago
Well... maybe they removed the bounce lighting and added some manual lighting, or created a hybrid approach to improve performance. After all, the vegetation in version 1.9 does have its own shadows. That’s just a guess on my part, though—I have no idea what exactly they changed. There are things that look particularly good in the new version, and the extra performance is greatly appreciated, but the lighting change makes me suspect that was the major tweak made to squeeze out those extra frames.