S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl
Overview
Ultra+ for Stalker 2 significantly reduces the amount of noise and improves fidelity while maintaining performance. It also addresses significant issues with the games color grading, exposure, and weather.
Game Tips
- Do not use any engine.ini mods
- BetterReflectionSDFs will cost a significant amount of VRAM
- HDR borderless support bypasses game’s native limitation
- Run game in borderless
- Strongly suggest lighting_overhaul_v2 - now fixes the games color grading, local exposure, weather, and GI
Configuration
| Setting | Options | Keybind | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| AutoApplyConfig | off,on | automatically reload settings when config changes - primarily to be used with the UPM overlay | |
| BetterReflectionSDFs | game,off,on,on_epic,on_insane | Increases the resolution of meshes in global software lumen space, most noticeable in reflections | |
| Bloom | game/0-3 | Bloom intensity (0.0 = off, 1.0 = default, 2.0 = double, game = use game default) | |
| ChromaticAberration | game,off,on | Recommend disabling in most games as it often just blurs the image for no benefit | |
| ColorGrading | game,off,on | allows disabling developer implemented color grading that can wash out some locations or cause significant transitions in interiors | |
| CustomLocalExposure | game,shadows,all | local exposure profiles loaded from PPVSettings.ini; use -1 for any profile value to preserve that property game default | |
| DarkerNights | off,on | enables dynamic darker nights by reducing skylight intensity at night | |
| DebugLogging | off,on | enable verbose debug logging to UE4SS console - use ALT+D to toggle at runtime | |
| Denoiser | game,none,none_temporalgihigh,mintemporal_temporalgihigh,temporal,temporal_high,rayreconstruction,rayreconstruction_temporalgihigh | F2 | Changes global illumination and reflection denoising - allows enabling ray reconstruction - temporal high settings increase the amount of temporal information to reduce noise at the cost of ghosting |
| DepthOfField | game,off,on,on_less_blurry | depth of field control - off reduces noise in cutscenes | |
| DirectionalLightIntensity | game/0.0-1.0 | Reduces intensity of the sun and moon | |
| EnableKeybinds | off,on | Enables individual setting keybinds if they are available, does not change global keybinds | |
| ExtendedDrawDistance | game,low,medium,high,epic,insane | separate objects from foliage like stop signs, puddles, and buildings | |
| ExtendedFoliageQuality | game,high,epic,extreme,ihatepopin,keepdistant_high,keepdistant_epic,keepdistant_extreme,keepdistant_ihatepopin | CTRL+F9 | extends the in game foliage quality, high is higher than vanilla epic, keepdistant variants keep r.ViewDistanceScale at 1.0 |
| ExtendedShadowQuality | game,veryhigh,epic,insane | all are higher than vanilla - recommend setting epic in game and then changing this setting | |
| FGCutscenes | off,on,on_spammy | enables support for frame generation in cutscenes - both DLSSG and FSRFG are supported - on_spammy attempts to reenable frame generation more frequently and for many more actions including PDA and menus | |
| FixColorGrading | game,on | fixes extreme values in color grading that result in blown out highlights requiring post correction | |
| FixWeatherSkylight | game,on | reduces excessive Sky Light intensity in certain weather conditions to sane values while preserving natural time-of-day variation | |
| Fog | game,off,on | Turns fog on or off, if on_with_lumen is provided then it allows enabling fog in lumen space (GI and reflections) | |
| HDR | game,off,on | !this setting provides a mechanism for using HDR in borderless fullscreen which the game does not support by default | |
| HighQualityTracing | game,off,on | CTRL+F8 | More accurate tracing of meshes for reflections and global illumination |
| LODBias | game,off,minuspoint5,minus1,minus1point5,minus2 | Forces textures to be higher resolution, -0.5 is the safest, more can cause frequency patterns to appear, some games benefit from more than others | |
| LODDistanceScale | game,high,veryhigh,epic,ultra,insane | Draw static meshes and foliage at higher quality further away | |
| LightingAO | lumen,ssao,gtao | F7 | Changes ambient occlusion method between Lumen, SSAO, or GTAO - lumen_less_noise is the safest default as full lumen may introduce shimmering/noise |
| LightingMaxIntensity | game/3-40 | !Maximum ray intensity for Lumen, lower values are darker and result in less noise (10-50) - 3 is vanilla | |
| LightingMode | game,uplus,uplus_experimental | F8 | lighting mode - uplus for default enhanced lighting - experimental for more dramatic changes to shading |
| LightingNoiseQuality | game,standard,high,veryhigh,epic,insane | Higher noise quality reduces noise at the cost of performance, but costs less than increasing lighting quality | |
| LightingQuality | game,medium,high,veryhigh,epic,insane | CTRL+F10 | Standard lighting quality is the recommended default, higher lighting qualities will reduce noise and increase the detail of lighting in the scene particularly around smaller object |
| LightingResolution | low,medium,high,veryhigh,epic,insane | F6 | lighting resolution quality - higher quality is more accurate lighting at the cost of performance - standard in-game epic (the same as epic in this setting) is typically x16 downsampling which is usually not necessary, medium (x32) is the minimum recommended |
| LightingUpdateSpeed | default,high,epic,insane | Allows making global illumination update faster | |
| LumenDiffuseColorBoost | game/0-5 | Increases diffuse lighting especially from local lights | |
| LumenTraceDistance | game/20000-100000 | Maximum distance of objects traced in the lumen scene | |
| MoonGlow | game,off | disables the low resolution moon glow texture | |
| MotionBlur | game/0-1 | Ultra+ improves motion blur quality in every game by default, recommend a small amount of blur ~0.2 | |
| RadianceLightingScale | game/1-10 | !Intensity scale of stalkers custom radiance cache - low values will fix guns - suggest increasing indirect and decreasing this as a balance - 10x is vanilla | |
| ReduceInputLatency | game,off,on | reduce input latency at potential FPS cost if not GPU bound | |
| ReflectionBias | game/0-1 | Adds smoothing to reflections to make them more mirror like, a small amount is usually beneficial | |
| ReflectionQuality | game,medium,high,veryhigh,epic,insane | F10 | Allows more surfaces to be included in reflections, in some games increasing this can cause some noise |
| Reflex | game,off,on | NVIDIA Reflex low latency | |
| Sharpness | game/0-1 | Control UE tonemapper sharpness - recommend setting this to 0 and using RCAS through reshade | |
| SkylightIntensity | game/0-3 | Skylight is a flat amount of light added to the scene, it mostly effects outdoors unless a game uses it to light interiors | |
| SkylightIntensityNight | game/0.0-2.0 | Night skylight intensity multiplier (0.0-1.0), used when DarkerNights is enabled | |
| SunMoonIndirectIntensity | game/0-20 | Indirect or bounce lighting intensity for the sun or moon | |
| TranslucentReflections | game,off,on | adds detailed reflections to translucent materials - may be preferable to turn it off in this game due to inaccuracy | |
| TuneLightSources | game,on,on_overhaul | on adds a minimum source radius to fix shadow penumbra, on_overhaul also reduces light intensities | |
| Upscaler | off,dlss_4.5,dlss_rayreconstruction,dlss,other | select your active upscaler to auto-configure denoising - dlss_4.5 uses Denoiser none_temporalgihigh, dlss_rayreconstruction uses the rayreconstruction Denoiser variant, both force MegaLights no-temporal variants; other upscalers use temporal Denoiser and MegaLights variants. off leaves Denoiser/MegaLightsQuality under manual control | |
| VSync | game,off,on | allow forcing vsync - helps latency in some games | |
| VignetteIntensity | game/0-2 | Vignette intensity scale (0.0 = off, 1.0 = default, 2.0 = double, game = use game default) |
Ultra+ 2.0
This game is built on the Ultra+ 2.0 framework which supports the following new features:
- Vanilla toggle (ALT + F2 default)
- Configurable keybinds (configurable via UPM)
- Full set of presets that are generated on game launch (integrates with UPM)
- Numeric settings
- Overlay integration (UPM overlay)
- Dynamic FPS
- Latest UE4SS features
- And more