Hardware Matters in Stalker Multiplayer

How big is your screen?

I only ask, because you might be at disadvantage in Stalker Multiplayer before you even lace up your radioactive slacks. I often wondered if upgrading to a larger display would adversely affect my gameplay or enhance it. Within a few short hours, all the wondering was set aside, and as I will explain, I quickly gave up using a relatively small 21″ LCD and now use a dell 3007wfp 30″ display. I call this a natural cheat because it’s a way of getting an edge over other players in a “natural” way. You can’t really blame or accuse someone of “using a bigger monitor than me” as this is a “natural” occurrence in the gaming world and the real world.

I can tell you for certain, on average I get 25% more frags per game thanks to a 30″ widescreen monitor, simply because characters appear for me sooner than I appear for others. As with the real world, a fraction of a second can mean life or death, and alike with a low ping rate, blending into the background while your enemy takes shape will mean a victory for you (as long as your aim is true). I am literally able to see people walking through cracks at a much higher rate than someone on a smaller LCD, resulting in me being called a cheater on numerous occasion; the usual response being, “how’d you know where I was? You must be hacking!”  Well, now you know, and I didn’t do a single thing except spend more money than most.

Your Other hardware must match your display.
Most of you can’t just up and buy a display of such high native resolution, in my case 2560×1600, without a little video card juice. I’m no expert, and have not been able to try out EVERY option available, but I can tell you what configuration works for me and helps me get many many frags per game (hardware matters alot). I’m using dual nvidia geforce 8800gtx cards in SLI mode (to help with 3d drawing and performance), 3gb pc6400 ddr, intel q6600 quad core processor, slow compared to many others, but I bought this for business, not necessarily game play so the CPU can be better.

Overclocking for Stalker
I don’t typically overclock and won’t do so on this machine for this game, and can’t tell you if it helps in multiplayer. If it does, I’m sure it can’t be much more than the tweaks and other hardware upgrades you can “naturally”

Ping Matters
Ping rate really does matter after much thought, and hardware can effect it to some degree. More on this later.