STALKER Performance Issues

[CliffyG]

I had major problems with running STALKER on XP, so much so that it blue screened loads unless i dropped the settings to minimal and even then it was so jerky i couldn't play it. Since upgrading to Vista Ultimate i thought I'd give it a second chance though. To even get it barely playable I've had to drop the in game settings to low quality and the ati drivers set to high performance. I haven't had a blue screen and it is less jerky but as far as I'm concerned is still not playable. I just cant fathom how it performs like this, i know i don't have a great up to date setup but it's not that bad. Is it just badly coded junk or is there something terribly wrong with my setup? My spec is:

AMD X2 4200
1 Gig Geil 6400
ATI x1800xt
I have 2 decent'ish 7200 SATA disks with the swap file on it's own partition on a different disk from the O/S.

I can generally run OK at medium settings as minimum on all recent games so what is it about STALKER that is killing my system so much. Actually as i type this I've remembered that Broken Sword 4 also ran like a complete dog.

 

[CliffyG]

Ah no i only went up to 1.0001 (that was the only one out when i was trying on XP). I'll try updating it now.

 

[CliffyG]

The patch has made a difference, quite a noticable one when just walking around calmly. Unfortunately as soon as i start moving the mouse quickly it gets jerky and shooting at the same time caused a couple of pauses. I'm not playing it like that so it gets shelved till patch 4, not that i'm confident about that sorting it out either .

 

[CliffyG]

AA is set to application controlled when the theme is set to high performance so it isnt that.

I didn't notice any shadows when i played on low settings but will jump on later tonight and see. Alt-Tabbing from STALKER hangs the application 9/10 times so i don't think that will help lol.

Aye i know only 1gig is the bottleneck but i refuse to upgrade when pretty much every other games works fine.