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SammiLucia and Lazorr

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sammilucia

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About this mod

Ultra+ is a series of mods designed for all PCs, fixing bugs and performance, with the best possible visuals.

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Only download Ultra+ mods from Nexus or Ultra Place Discord. We do not upload anywhere else.
 
Support and Supporting

Join The Ultra Place Discord For the fastest support and releases. See you there!


If you'd like to support our efforts please endorse, share or support us on Patreon


About Ultra+

Ultra+ is a series of mods designed for all PCs, fixing bugs and performance, with the best possible visuals.


What it Does

Ultra+ is a series of mods for everyone, fixing bugs and performance, with the best possible visuals.

This is NOT an engine.ini

Ultra+ mods take complete control of Unreal, from texture definitions, NPC quality, cut scenes, to even game settings menus — everything. You cannot do this mod in an engine.ini.

The goal of the Ultra+ series of mods is simple: To fix all engine problems (including performance and quality), so that everyone can play the game the way it was intended by the authors (from potato to insane).


Comparison Video
Thank you to user WatercressQuirky for making this video.



Version 4.3.0
  • Added a new autoexposure setting - "on_plus" - this changes the autoexposure behavior a bit to help improve balance of lighting and low light conditions, it should also result in a faster autoexposure changes - if you had issues with the game being too dark then use this
  • Reworked lighting quality settings - performance/standard/high/high_less_leakage/epic/insane/reallyinsane high_less_leakage through reallyinsane have enabled an additional lumen setting to improve light leakage indoors (this setting costs a few fps so the quality settings have been rebalanced in terms of performance) - epic costs less VRAM than before due to the trade
  • Tuned general performance and lighting
  • Improved contrast, brightness, and issues with some textures in advanced lighting mode
  • NightVision compatibility fixed


Version 4.2.0

  • 4.2.0 - Reduced number of changes made by U+ and tuned mod overall. Significantly improved performance especially with higher settings. Visuals should be roughly the same, but FPS should increase notably. Resolved issue where CPU bottlenecks would occur in some places that would impact FPS dramatically. Most of the problems were a result of foliage, nanite, and shadows. Changed lighting mode "low" to "performance" and tuned for more performance though it may sacrifice lighting quality a bit more. Improved general compatibility. 
  • 4.2.1 - Fix shadow issue on meshes like hay and spider webs (costs a couple FPS)

Notes:
  • If using shadow changes in your Engine.ini these may be causing CPU bottlenecks in settlements or other locations. It is recommended to remove them if you are unhappy with your performance. 
  • If you are using DLSS4, turn DLSSAutoExposure off otherwise it will cause black spots with the flashlight.
  • Do not use Engine.ini mods that change many settings, especially graphics settings, with U+. They will conflict and cause problems.
  • Use borderless and not fullscreen
  • If using HDR enable it through the mod and not via fullscreen in game

If you are currently on all epic settings and unhappy with performance. Use high in game settings - it will still look much better than vanilla.


What's new?
While v3 of Ultra+ brought significant improvements to the lighting overall, we were limited in trying to force engine variables to account for issues with the game assets themselves. v4 introduces a completely new method that modifies the game assets via the PostProcessVolumes and greatly enhances the quality of lighting by making it more diffuse and "bounce" farther as you would expect light to do. This is not possible to do by just changing engine variables.

The lighting configuration has been completely overhauled. It was getting to be a bit unwieldy before and we were using some hacky methods to make the lighting better. Now there are 3 lighting configurations available in the settings:
- LightingMode
  - standard - this mode is the most vanilla and does not change the default look of the foliage which can be overly bright and glowy. All of the quality enhancements provided otherwise are available
  - standard_fix_foliage - this mode is simply the standard mode with a fix for the color and diffusion of foliage lighting
  - advanced - this mode applies a couple of settings that change the way the diffuse lighting is calculated - it is not necessarily superior to standard mode, there will likely be scenarios where one or the other look better but this mode should handle multiple light sources a little bit better as well as have more proper diffusion on foliage
- LightingQuality
  - low - only use this mode if you are struggling for FPS, it is the lowest lighting resolution available
  - standard - the default configuration that should perform generally well
  - high - a minor performance hit and a bit of a higher resolution lighting cache - it will require more VRAM
  - epic - a more significant performance hit with higher resolution lighting and higher resolution lighting cache - it will require more VRAM
  - epic_alt - similar to epic with a higher resolution lighting cache and slightly lower resolution than epic
  - epic_alt2 - similar to epic_alt but with has the highest lighting resolution of all modes
- LightingAO
  - Lumen - uses the Lumen AO methods that have the highest quality but also the most noise - if you are having shimmering issues with foliage which can happen particularly with DLSS4 then another mode will resolve your noise issues - if you can use ray reconstruction it will resolve the shimmering foliage
  - SSAO - traditional method that produces a more "game" like ambient occlusion that is also the least realistic
  - GTAO - more of a global estimation of ambient occlusion that is closer to the realism of lumen

Performance should be on par or better than it was before depending on your configuration.

Note that the ray reconstruction exclusive lighting modes have been removed.

What do we recommend?
 - Users should have a high quality experience simply using standard_fix_foliage with standard or high lighting quality, if you can afford to use ray reconstruction, or if you are playing at resolution close to native, then lumen for LightingAO would be the best choice. If lumen AO is too noisy for you, we recommend using GTAO, or SSAO if you prefer that style of look in your games.
 - For the highest quality, it is up to user preference between standard_fix_foliage and advanced lighting modes. Epic quality is a good place to start with epic_alt2 being the theoretical highest quality option available. Increasing the lighting resolution won't necessarily create a better image in all instances, but it should be better on average.

What about other settings?
- BetterReflectionSDFs - if you can afford the VRAM usage then we recommend enabling this setting. However, it can cause additional stuttering.
- Bloom - user preference
- ChromaticAberration - this should always be off in Stalker. It is a poor implementation that only serves to blur the image.
- CustomAutoExposure - enhances the performance of the games finicky default auto exposure, recommend on for a more stable result
- DLSSPreset - only relevant if using DLSS and still on DLSS3
- Denoiser - temporal for general purpose and performance, ray reconstruction if you can afford it and have an NVIDIA GPU
- ExtendedFoliageQuality - user preference as well as performance limited, if you don't like foliage popping in and out then turn this up but you will sacrifice FPS especially in dense areas like the red forest
- FGCutscenes - on_spammy will attempt to re-enable FG for more actions such as the PDA and will keep trying for 3 minutes to try and work around issues re-enabling it in some cutscenes
- FogLightShafts - recommended off to reduce issues with overblown light shafts in some indoor settings
- HDR - up to user hardware
- LODDistanceScale - this setting is related to a few particular types of foliage, mostly trees in settlement areas, user preference and minor performance hit
- MotionBlur - user preference
- ReflectionBias - medium is a good middle ground, user preference
- ReflectionQuality - ultra if possible, can also be visual preference, but ultra will provide reflections for the most surfaces
- Reflex - user preference
- SceneBrightness - changes the intensity of the skylight which mostly impacts the brightness of outdoor scenes and the contrast between shadowed and lit areas, if you find shadowed areas too dark outdoors then increase this, otherwise leave at default
- Vignette - user preference

What else has changed?
- Bloom intensity has also been adjusted deeper within the game assets. This means that bloom is now usable without completely blowing out the image and making external light sources overly bright. Feel free to use the highest level bloom setting now.
- Menu and loading screen detection have been implemented to handle some edge cases and make cutscene frame generation a bit more intelligent. Now we will stop forcing frame generation constantly in menus or when loading when you start the game or are using the on_spammy setting.


Note about rendering artifacts: This game will sometimes have rendering artifacts when the internal resolution is not an even number. Typically these can be seen at the bottom and the right side of the screen at various upscaling quality levels. The only way to fix this is changing your resolution to be an even number. For example DLSS quality at 0.667 for native resolution of 3440x1440 is an internal resolution of 2295x961. If the ratio is changed to 0.668, the internal resolution becomes 2298x962 which fixes the artifacts. The lighting overhaul ray reconstruction modes can make this problem worse at uneven resolutions. If you use DLSS, the tool DLSS Tweaks can be used to adjust the DLSS ratios. When installing DLSS Tweaks, rename the provided dll to "winmm.dll". If you mouse over a DLSS quality level in DLSS tweaks, the resulting internal resolution will be displayed.


  • Enabled Ray Reconstruction without hassle (switchable via F2)
  • Enabled garbage collection to address out of memory issues, since it was effectively disabled
  • Significantly improved reflections quality (use F10 to adjust)
  • Reduce fog disocclusion noise (ghosting)
  • Prevents Chroma64 DLL from loading
  • Fixes boiling noise on rough reflections
  • Improves skin lighting (subsurface scattering)
  • Changes motion blur so it smooths between frames (like film) instead of being a visual effect. (You should not notice it's enabled except the game looks smoother)
  • Increased vegetation draw distance (Epic) to reduce (and mostly eliminate) pop-in with as low performance impact as possible
  • Disabled several debug options which shouldn't be enabled in shipping builds
  • Optional: enables several function key shortcuts (defaults in bold):
          F2: Denoiser Mode (None, Temporal, RayReconstruction)
          F3: Vignette (True/False)
          F4: Motion Blur (Off/Low/High)
          F6: DLSSPreset (A=1, C=3, E=5, F=6, G=7 — yes there is a real preset G, yes it looks great)
          F9: Reflection Bias (0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6)
          F10: Reflection Quality (Vanilla, High, Ultra)
          F12: Load current configuration file live in-game
          CTRL + F6: Force Nvidia Reflex with Boost+ (True/False)
          CTRL + F8: Force HDR without requiring exclusive fullscreen (True/False)
  • Increases Epic sky quality closer to cut-scene
  • Increases Epic bloom to cut-scene quality, and High bloom to Epic (Low/Med are untouched)
  • Increases Epic lighting (Lumen) beyond to cut-scene quality, in a performant way (in vanilla, Epic and High were essentially the same
  • Fixes most vegetation popping for Epic and High
  • Improves particle quality to cut-scene for Epic
  • Changed streaming for cut-scenes for Low/Med/High settings, which should prevent cut-scene hitching on lower VRAM cards
  • Actually scaled texture quality for High and Epic — Virtual textures were using the same resolutions for all graphics qualities. Epic now = cut-scene, High is between Med/Epic, and Med/Low are untouched
  • Adjusted several cut-scene settings that were too high and will cause hitches/stalls in cut scenes
  • Increased shadow quality. Scaled shadow graphics menu Low-Epic more sensibly. Low should now also look much better without significant change to performance
  • Increased Epic post-process settings closer to cut-scene, and slightly improved High

Screen Comparisons

Not yet available for v4.0.0



Community Comments
"what differs them from others is that they know what they are doing and they respect the developer's intent and artistic choices...plus they do not disable some visuals for "performance" or increase some details unrealistically. that's why I use this mod."
— Xtreme512
"Just like cyberpunk ultra plus I'm really impressed. Great job and I also want you to know that I really appreciate the new motion blur. Game looks phenomal now, thank you for this must-have mod :)
— Jbonk1
"...I cannot believe how incredibly well this game runs with this mod. I thought it was working well, until I realised I was running the game naively in DLAA"
— jblam
I just wanna give a huge compliment to the creators of this mod. They are some of the most dedicated, helpful and caring modders you'll ever come across.

They work so hard on this. And this is the ultimate must-have mod for Stalker 2.
— ImJacket
Without the mod now it plays like I poured **** in my eyes or something like this.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you again for the mod, the best of the best..
— sailor.sad

Installing

Note:
  • If you prefer smoothness and FPS, choose the FSR3 frame gen add-on (only needed for RTX 4000 series GPUs)
  • If you prefer lowest latency, choose DLSS frame gen (no add-on required)

Ultra+ Mod Manager Installation and Configuration: 
UMM provides a way to easily install, update, and configure Ultra+ mods.
  • Download and install Ultra+ Mod Manager (UMM)
  • Run the application, and select Stalker 2 (or Stalker 2GP for Game Pass), and click Initialize.
  • If using UNN v1.4 or newer, the path should automatically be detected for the Steam version.  If not (or for the Game Pass version), navigate to where you installed Stalker 2 and select the indicated .exe, then click Open, then click Save. 
    - Standard Stalker 2 installations, select "Stalker2-Win64-Shipping.exe" in "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\Stalker2\Binaries\Win64"
    - Game Pass installations, select "gamelaunchhelper.exe" in "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2\Content"
  • You may get an error at this point about the file "nvgx_dlssd.dll" is missing.  This is normal; nvgx_dlssd.dll is required to use Ray Reconstruction (Note: Nvidia users only).  Click Ok.  If you do not plan to use Ray Reconstruction, you can ignore this message.  If you do wish to use Ray Reconstruction, follow these steps:  Click Open Folder, and copy nvngx_dlssd.dll from here to Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\DLSS\Binaries\ThirdParty\Win64\
  • Now that UMM is configured for Stalker, to install or update Ultra+, go to the Installed Mods tab, click the box next to UltraPlus, select Install Mod Update, select the zip file you downloaded, and click Open.  Confirm installation and UMM will handle installation (or updating).
Note:  Steps 1-4 only need to be performed the first time; after which you can simply select your game and select Load.

Now, you can configure mod settings in the Settings tab; this can be done while the game is running as well; simply press F12 in-game to load your new settings.  Launch the game either via the Launch Game button in UMM or your usual means.
Important:  Adjust in-game graphics menus, Ultra+ is now in control of them

          Epic: Is now actually Epic — Cut-scene quality visuals now much higher than vanilla Epic, so costs FPS (see benchmark images)
          High: Faster and higher quality than vanilla Epic — About the same performance as vanilla 'Epic', but better visuals
          Med: Much faster and higher quality than vanilla Medium
          Low: Significantly faster and higher quality than vanilla Low

Manual Installing:
  • Drag everything in the main zip to your S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\ folder
  • (FSR-FG only) Drag everything in the FSR3 frame gen add-on into the same folder (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\). Select yes to overwrite
  • If you want to use Ray Reconstruction, copy nvngx_dlssd.dll from here into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\DLSS\Binaries\ThirdParty\Win64\
  • Adjust in-game graphics menus, Ultra+ is now in control of them
          Epic: Is now actually Epic — Cut-scene quality visuals now much higher than vanilla Epic, so costs FPS (see benchmark images)
          High: Faster and higher quality than vanilla Epic — About the same performance as vanilla 'Epic', but better visuals
          Med: Much faster and higher quality than vanilla Medium
          Low: Significantly faster and higher quality than vanilla Low
  • Updated (Recommended) Update Nvidia Streamline (Nvidia Frame Gen only). This fixes a memory leak when opening/closing PDAs around NPCs. Find all updated files here. You may also be able to use just nvngx_dlssg.dll from TechPowerUp
  • You can also control Ultra+ using function keys or by editing Stalker 2\Binaries\Win64\UltraPlusConfig.ini. There is detailed instructions inside UltraPlusConfig.ini
  • Note: As of v1.9+ you may need to increase in-game/RenoDX brightness
  • Enjoy, S.T.A.L.K.E.R!
Note: Ultra+ will create (or update) UltraPlusConfig.ini when you run the game.

If you need any help please join the Discord 😊

Uninstalling
Ultra+ Mod Manager:
  • If you used UMM to install the Ultra+, simply run UMM, select Hogwarts, and select Load.
  • Navigate to the Mod Settings tab, click the box next to UltraPlus in the list, then select Uninstall Mod.  Confirm, and that's it!
Manual Uninstallation:
  • Delete Stalker2\Content\Paks\~UltraPlus*.pak
  • Delete Stalker2\Binaries\Win64\dwmapi.dll
  • Delete Stalker2\Binaries\Win64\ue4ss
  • You're done!

Shader Compilation

Ultra+ forces a full pre-optimization pass of shaders at game startup. Since game version 1.0.2 this is only taking ~60 seconds.

It's highly recommended to let the game pre-optimize shaders once after any new game patch, or updating your GPU drivers. However, after this, you can disable shader precompilation by:

  • Copy the optional Engine.ini to %LocalAppData%\Stalker2\Saved\Config\Windows\
  • (Shader compilation will now be skipped at game-launch)

Performance

My goal with Ultra+ mods is that everyone can enjoy the games we love, and provide that last 10% polish that game devs often don't get the time to. This means this mod is for all PCs, high and low.

In the vanilla S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, cut-scenes are the only thing that run at true epic quality (but they are capped at 30 fps). With Ultra+, you will now get cut-scene quality in-game, however this does have a cost.

I've taken great care to adjust the in-game graphics menus so they scale better. However this means if you have a 4070/4080/3090/7800, you might struggle to run everything at Epic now. This is by design.

Per "What this Does" above, I have:
  • Improved performance of cut-scenes without reducing visual quality (some settings were wasted)
  • Moved many cut-scene settings to Epic
  • Adjusted Low, Med, and High graphics settings so they scale sensibly for everyone

As a general rule:
  • Epic: Targets 4090/7900/etc. cards
  • High: Targets 4070/4080/3080/3090/7700/7800/etc.
  • Med: Targets 4050/4060/7600/3070/1650/etc.
  • Low: I'm not sure how low things will go yet, this game is pretty heavy on GPU, but let me know, and I will do my best to get it working!

What Mode is Ultra+ in?
  • Open S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\Stalker2\Binaries\Win64\UltraPlusConfig.ini to see and edit the mod settings
  • (These settings will be restored on boot)
  • (There isn't a way to display these live on-screen yet but we're working on it)

Compatibility

Engine.ini mods
Ultra+ is a complete reconfiguration of Unreal Engine. It is not a simple Engine.ini, it modifies many configuration files within UE.

Understand that we see many (most?) Engine.ini mods copying some settings from Ultra+ mods without properly understanding how they work (and without crediting us, read the MIT license guys, c'mon it's easy).

Ultra+ is not compatible with engine.ini mods. You're always welcome to ask us about specific Engine.ini commands in the Discord.

Note that many "optimisation" mods are also now packing the Engine.ini into pak files. Ultra+ is not compatible with these either.


A Word on Ray Tracing

There are some mods which claim to enable ray tracing...

There is no ray tracing in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. The game was not compiled with ray tracing at all. You can use the commands, which do nothing. The game uses only software Lumen


Recommended Mods
A list of other mods which fix bugs/make improvements:


Contributors

Thank you to everyone in the Discord and in Posts providing feedback. I could not do this without you!

With special thanks to:
  • Lazorr — for updates to Ultra Plus Extensions
  • InfamousSaviour — for solution to out of video memory for AMD users
  • Narknon — for UE4SS and being our UE hero ❤️
  • Stormline9811
  • sqparadox — for debugging the main menu music and missing controller settings
  • MrJacket — for better Low/Med shadow settings

Other Ultra+ Games
All Ultra+ Games
Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake)
Days Gone
Hogwarts Legacy
Robocop: Rogue City
Cyberpunk 2077
Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order
Avowed
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
Ghostrunner II
RuneScape: Dragonwilds