I bought the whole series and they all act the same way, they stutter here and there especially when running, is that normal? can I do something to fix it?
I read before that these games suffer from many bugs and issues but I would imagined that it will be solved by now..

Any help will be much appreciated, thank you.

Hey kingbob,

From my own experience this is likely either caused by prefetching or the non-static rendering modes in the STALKER series. First try disabling prefetching (look up "stalker noprefetch"), this is enabled by default. It speeds up loading times by reducing wait states, but causes stuttering/freezing etc. when loading a lot of objects. Disabling it will completely remove or really reduce the amount of stuttering in the game, but might make loading levels (entering a game area/map) a little longer.

If it's still stuttering - especially indoors or near light sources like fire - the rest of it is probably due to dynamic lighting. In the in-game video options choose "Static Lighting" (or try other versions that don't stutter for you). This is probably because the dynamic light sources are not very well optimized or just graphically demanding in general, static lighting will look a lot less cool-looking but should make the game a lot smoother in general.

Let me know if it works. :)

Thank you very much I'll try the 1st thing, about the lightning yeah I know it stutters like hell on dynamic lightning and it's certainly something wrong with the game engine.
I have an uber high end pc: x99-a,i7 5820k 6 cores, gtx980, 16gb ram ddr4 2666mhz.
My pc is overkill for most games out there today and most of them run smooth as butter but this one really confound me.. I figured it's probably bad optimized games but untill this day they didnt fix it? lol

Yeah same here. It probably is badly-optimized lighting. I just play on static lighting now, I find the game a lot more fun to play now that it's super smooth.

Well the prefetch thingy didnt work and dont get me wrong the game is super smooth on max graphics but I get stutters here and there probabalt due the faulty texture load engine.
I even looked up in steam and it seems everyone get those stutters even on low graphics.
It's just a shame that good and I mean really good games like that get crappy amateur coding.

You can enjoy stutter-free dynamic lighting if you make a few adjustments to the game's settings through nvidia's control panel. Here's a how-to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8e1ipGyAjs Note that if you enable vsync in nvidia's settings (nvidia has a cool feature called adaptive-sync), you should probably disable the vsync from the game's menu. I have the GTX970 and the fix works great.

Apart from that, you'll still get a few stutters here and there (as you already noticed), but rarely enough to not bother you.

Better late then sorry, i just tested something that i saw on a video.
In the Nvidia control panel
change
- Maximum pre-rendered frames: 3
to
- Maximum pre-rendered frames: 1

Fixed the fire stuttering :)
Hope it helps.

ps : sorry for AMD / ATI guys i don't have one and i don't even know if the problem exist with those cards.

<-- AMD Stalker & apart from the pre-fetching, which I fixed,I have no problems. \o/

RadeonPro is you friend:

[i]kojocel: A bit late to the party, but this might help:
---------------------------------------------
1. Download RadeonPro
2. Start RadeonPro -> Add profile -> Find the XR_3DA.exe in your STALKER/bin directory and then click on "Open"
3. Go to the Advanced tab
4. Set Flip Queue Size to 1
5. Make sure RadeonPro IS running while Starting the game.
--------------------------------------------

I hope this helps[/i]