After its somewhat unsteady launch on PC and Xbox consoles last year, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl has ended its console exclusivity period with a new version for PlayStation 5 consoles. The game's one-year milestone on other platforms also offers us at DF a good opportunity to review its progress on those systems, whereupon we discovered something surprising: we can now finally, one year later, recommend the game on its original PC and Xbox launch platforms.

Rewind to late 2024, and you'll find our initial impressions were coloured by a last-minute patch that resolved some, but not all, of the pre-release performances issues we'd found. That version of the game on PC exhibited intense CPU-bound performance dips when many NPCs were on-screen at the same time, while the Xbox version struggled with general performance issues, not to mention seconds-long freezes mid-game.

Sadly, it took almost a full year for those performance issues to be addressed, with even September's patch 1.6 on Xbox continuing to suffer from significant performance dips. But, oh, what a different 0.1 in a version number makes, as we can confirm significant performance increases across all STALKER 2 versions in patch 1.7. Its detailed patch notes include no less than 19 uses of the word "optimised" across the board, including touch-ups to meshes, materials, lighting, cloth simulation, animations, asset streaming and more.

Though we did not capture Xbox Series X performance on patch 1.6, we can confirm frequent frame-rate dips in the 40-50fps range in that version, which Series X's performance mode now confidently strides past in locking to a far more consistent 60fps in its latest patch. We estimate roughly 99 percent of gameplay fixes to a 60fps cadence, with fast runs through the populated city zone dropping to a mid-50fps range as an exception.

The Series X quality mode - and the Series S's default 30fps mode, for that matter - enjoy an apparent 30fps lock across the board, meanwhile, even in the choke points we'd previously measured. Plus, 30fps play on either Xbox no longer suffers from bizarre seconds-long freezes.

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Grenade effects warp the screen and stress the CPU in STALKER 2 as we compare the PC version's launch code to its recent 1.7 patch. Frame-times are much smoother and frame-rates are much higher.

Compared to its launch version on PC, STALKER 2 now also enjoys an average 26 percent uplift in performance when CPU limited, and that boost is met by far more stable frame-times this time around. You will still find the game can be punishing with settings maxed out, but thanks to this optimisation of CPU-bound scenarios, we no longer insist that PC players cap their frame-rates to have an enjoyable STALKER 2 experience.

As far as the game's future, we were tipped off to an exciting development during that same Gamescom conversation. The devs are targeting an Unreal Engine 5.5.4 or later upgrade to add additional UE5 features to the game's PC version, possibly by the end of 2025. Additions could include rendering hardware interface (RHI) improvements, less expensive virtual shadow maps (VSM) performance and additional engine-specific efficiencies. Whenever such a patch arrives, we'll be eager to see how it impacts the PC version - and whether its updated code base finds its way to current-gen consoles.

For more on the new PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro versions of STALKER 2, head to our coverage of that newly launched port.