Stalker 2 Xbox performance ravaged by A-Life fixes, but the trade-off is worth it

On release, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl was a game that ran pretty damn well on Xbox Series consoles, but the release suffered from a devastated A-Life system. Now, a new patch fixes the game’s A-Life AI simulation, making the world feel more alive, but performance has suffered.

In an interview shortly after launch, developer GSC Game World revealed that the game’s busted A-Life system was butchered by aggressive optimisation. Now that the system has been moderately fixed, although there’s still a long way to go, the Xbox version of the game isn’t running so hot.

Stalker 2 A-Life kneecaps Xbox performance

Following the release of the Stalker 2 Patch 1.1 update, players immediately noticed a massive cut to performance on Xbox Series X and Series S. Prior to the update, the game was mostly stable, outside of key areas filled with NPCs and interactive elements.

However, now, Stalker 2 runs at a significantly lower level of performance with even normal traversal through the game’s lush open world resulting in noticeable drops in framerate. What was once a smooth experience on console, despite the number of other technical issues, is buckling under the improved systems. But is it that bad?

In our testing, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl on Xbox seems mostly stable when moving across the world. However, when A-Life activities start taking place—such as two factions fighting each other from afar—the framerate does noticably drop. While we don’t have the bespoke framerate measuring tools of, say, Digital Foundry, my TV’s VRR tracker noticed a drop down to 42fps, just barely hitting the VRR window.

For players with VRR displays, this means that you’ll notice the game going in and out of that special window that makes games with uneven framerates feel better to play. For those without, the huge variance in performance may be very noticeable.

Players on the official Xbox subreddit have noticed the significant cut in performance with one player saying: “ this patch has made performance much worse on XBSX. I was so excited to continue my playthrough over the holidays but now that there are more NPCs and mutants the framerate tanks down to 40fps or less when there is action happening.”

However, in our experience, which is only a couple of hours with this patch, the performance drop is worth the benefit. Even across just two hours of play, the world of Stalker 2 feels so much closer to its predecessors. This world is now truly alive, and we already adored the original release. That doesn’t mean everything is fixed. For example, enemies still see you through walls and the like, but it’s much improved.

If you can handle uneven performance—although it has yet to drop under 30fps for us—then this update is absolutely balling.