S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl and MSFS 2024 arrive next week — here are the system requirements and driver details

Two of the most hotly anticipated games are slated to arrive next week: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Both will be under our microscope for performance, and the GPU companies are already gearing up for the releases. Nvidia has Game Ready driver 566.14 with support for both titles, and it also patches several issue, including the infamous Corsair iCUE CPU utilization bug.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is the sequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which debuted in 2007. The second game is a hybrid first-person shooter, immersive sim, and horror game all wrapped into one. The game takes advantage of Unreal Engine 5, potentially giving the game excellent visual fidelity and graphical realism — and perhaps inevitably the performance issues and bugs that Uneal Engine 5 is known for.

The game heads back to the Chornobyl reactor and surrounding environment, inspired by the real-life nuclear disaster that took place at the Chornobyl plant — paired with a fictional story and timeline. The game takes place in a 64 km squared open world centered around Chornobyl full of radiation, mutants, and anomalies. The story has several different paths set by in-game decisions, enabling the player to make their own story.

The system requirements look somewhat tame, though we have to wonder what level of performance they target. You’ll need at least an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X or Intel Core i7-7700K processor, 16GB of memory, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB, or Intel Arc A750 graphics card. You’ll also want 160GB (!) of SSD storage.

Recommended system specs are quite a bit higher: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X or Intel Core i7-11700, 32GB of memory, and either an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070. And 160GB of SSD storage still.

How will the game run? We’ll do our own testing as soon as we’re able, but in the interim Nvidia has provided some benchmarks, showcasing both native…