If you’re wondering if STALKER 2 has ray tracing, the answer is rather complicated. When ray tracing is mentioned, most players think of NVIDIA’s RTX platform, but that’s not the only technology that supports the feature. STALKER 2’s lighting system is rather unique and may be pioneering how illumination and shadows are handled in games in the future.
How does ray tracing work in STALKER 2?
STALKER 2 uses Unreal Engine Lumen in software mode to generate all the game’s lighting, reflections, and shadows. You’ll notice shaders being asynchronously computed on each launch, and Lumen is part of that process. The upside to this is that you don’t need an NVIDIA GPU with RT cores for ray tracing to work. Instead, the feature is compatible with any system that is powerful enough to run the game, regardless of whether it’s using an AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA GPU. However, some drawbacks to using Lumen in software mode make it inferior to RTX. Additionally, the quality of the ray tracing is lower, and fewer sources can be used to generate rays.
Notably, STALKER 2 doesn’t have any non-ray tracing lighting. While games using RTX have to have traditional pre-baked lighting to fall back on, those that use Lumen don’t have that limitation since the feature is hardware agnostic. That’s a double-edged sword, though. Lumen is more hardware-intensive than traditional lighting, leading to worse overall performance.
So, yes, STALKER 2 has ray tracing, but you won’t see an option for it in the settings. It can’t be turned off and is essential to the game. It’s among the first games (if not the first) to handle lighting like this, but we wouldn’t be surprised if this is the future standard in Unreal Engine-powered games. When properly used, Lumen is easier to implement and creates more varied and accurate lighting than pre-baking without losing fidelity.
