So what settings do you (or did you) have STALKER set at?

I'm trying to follow the advice I got in one of my earlier threads, and I like the game now that I've given it more time.

I do have a major problem though: Whenever I play on a setting higher than static lighting the game either crashes (immediately or after a few minutes) or becomes unplayable.

It's completely stable with static lighting. But the game looks so much better with dynamic lighting I really don't want to play with the static setting.

I've tried many different combinations of settings (AA,AF, draw distance etc). I even dropped the res down form 1680x1050 (that helped a little but it still crashed after about 5 minutes).

I have a GTS 320; does the card not have enough RAM? Is there a setting I should disable or dial down completely? A weird graphic glitch I've gotten is that under dynamic lighting at 160x1050 3/4 of the screen is tinted bright yellow (you can still sort of see through it but of course it's unplayable). It goes away at a lower res or static lighting.

And we're talking hard crashes here; blue screens, pops and beeps and buzzes, general weirdness. After one it took my PC about 5 minutes to boot up again (it usually takes 30 seconds).

Maybe I'm just one of the unlucky ones who has a bad configuration for this game.

Any ideas or suggestions?


Thanks

I'm playing through it on max settings with extra dynamic lights and motion blur at 1280x1024 and it's never crashed (I've got a64 4800+, 2gb ram and 4850 gfx card).

Lots of stuff to fiddle with on tweakguide:

http://www.tweakguides.com/STALKER_1.html

Also, make sure you update to the latest version of the game. I notice your rams not matched, would that fubar the game (uses about 1gb on my setup)?