GSC Updates Recommended PC Requirements Following Gamer Outcry

The GSC Game World studio published its latest recommended PC configurations two days ago for the highly anticipated Stalker 2 : Heart of Chornobyl.

These turn out to be much more powerful than the first configurations announced in 2021, the game having since moved to Unreal Engine 5.

The recommendations therefore remain unsurprising for a game running on such an engine, while the developer indicates that a GeForce 2070 Super or a Radeon RX 5700 XT are necessary for gaming at 1080p.

However, GSC had to make a last minute addition in order to clarify a vital fact: all these presets require activating the upscaling options of the different manufacturers to claim to reach 60 FPS.

Crisis management at GSC

The information comes to us from a simple message on the game’s official Discord this Thursday, November 14. The community manager of the GSC studio, Molt1t, then responded to one of the members on the subject:

To achieve the specified performance at medium, high and epic levels, you should use DLSS, TSR and their analogues

This condition was not specified in any way on the official visual mentioning the recommended configurations as well as on the game’s Steam page. Such a revelation set fire to the powder on the Steam forum while a user vehemently attacked the studio for having “lied to players” about its recommendations before being banned by one of the moderation members.

The affair has since been widely reported on Reddit and Twitter (X) before the ban was canceled by the studio, which mentioned a “new moderator” who “made a mistake on this subject”.

Since then, mention of the different upscaling technologies from Nvidia, AMD, Intel and even Epic have been added to the game’s “System Requirements” section on Steam.

Upscaling becomes mandatory on Unreal Engine 5

The subject comes up constantly since the resurgence of games running on Unreal Engine 5: technologies like DLSS and FSR are now part of the conditions required to run these games in good conditions. This was the case for Immortals of Aveum, Hellblade 2 and even more recently Black Myth: Wukong.

The problem lies in the communication strategy of the studios, which do not systematically mention this important detail in the visuals summarizing these minimum and recommended PC configurations. The information is then specified on the Steam page in an “Additional note” section at the bottom of the page.

It seems here that GSC simply failed to indicate it, while Stalker 2 promises to be an extremely demanding game, even requiring 160 GB of SSD storage at least.