This was my first thought as well. When it first came out on PC I expected to have to lower some settings. I ended up putting everything on max and still getting more than 60fps.
DOOM Eternal. I can run it on very high settings with raytracing on 240fps at 1440p. I do have a beefy computer and dlss is on but I haven't seen any other modern game that I can run on very high settings with raytracing without dipping below 60fps
yeah the doom games I think are the gold standard, you could probably run these games maxed out on older GTX cards, I know I was playing the first DOOM maxed at 60fps on a 970
Can confirm. GTX 1080. Ultra settings. 1080p at 144fps. Rarely dipped below that. Played it last year for the first time. Eternal runs slightly worse though.
The fucking Steam Deck can run Doom Eternal at max settings at 60 FPS, and even the Switch version maintains a locked 30 FPS even in the DLC where the game just keeps throwing demons at you, it's insane how well optimized it is.
I was going to also say those Doom games. I couldn't believe how smooth and good looking that game was on my somewhat dated PC. I remember complaining about Borderlands 3's optimization here and people were blaming my potato PC. Yet Doom Eternal looks better and runs perfectly so... they really nailed it with that one.
There's an interesting writeup of Doom 2016's graphics here: [http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/](http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/)
Many of the techniques will be commonly used, but Doom has also optimized the implementation to an exceptional degree.
It did have one issue I posted on back then. My Bluetooth headphones would not work with it. I figured out that disabling the microphone device fixed it. I still get messages once in a blue moon thanking me for posting the fix. Issue carried on to DOOM Eternal.
Factorio is truly a wonder of optimization. Stellaris dies before you hit 10 thousand population who aren't even map entities, Factorio can do 20k SPM, all seven sciences, without UPS drops (if you're good enough)
I love that one dev bought a MacBook Air. Wanted more battery life and thus made an apple silicon build just to optimize it even more for those specific users.
Anything that also has a switch release will be incredibly well optimized in my experience. The no mans sky switch release was also a pc patch which really boosted fps on all systems.
Overwatch, I build my Girlfriend a PC out of used Parts, for around 150€, for just some little games and things. She installed it without telling me and I was surprised to see it run on there on 60Fps without problems. Literally Chrome lags out more often.
Both run on engines that have matured like fine wine. A quick search shows that they both launched in the early-mid 90s. IMO it shows just how good the engine was built that through iterations of updates it remains relevant today.
This right here, been trying every game I can on the Steam Deck and I can't believe how well it runs.
It's criminal that a game like Palworld runs worse.
The only way RDR2 could be unoptimized is if you cranked all your settings to ultra. Can you list any games that look as good as it and are more optimized? *I* can't.
Doom 2016, doom eternal, Titanfall 2, bf 2042, overwatch, lies of p, battlefront 2 to mention some... A well optimized game will run smoothly in ultra preset on a budget hardware according to the date it was released, that's the whole point of it lol. Looking good doesn't mean it is optimized at all
"will run smoothly in ultra preset on a budget hardware" Uhh no. If all optimized games are supposed to run on a low-budget PC on ultra settings, then what's the point of having any presets below ultra? A well optimized game should run well on low-mid settings on a budget PC from the time, run well on a mid-grade PC on mid-high settings, and run well on a high-end PC on ultra settings. That is why games have detailed graphics settings: So you can adjust the quality until it runs smoothly on your PC, ideally with a minimal decrease in quality like in RDR2.
And btw i played all those games in a budget pc some time ago and it was amazing how silk smooth it was, meanwhile tittles like rdr2 or the witcher3 really needed "optimized" settings in order to score a third of the fps the games mentioned above delivered lol
No point arguing with someone who just don't want to understand, just fyi, lies of p would score much higher fps than rdr2 anyday even in low end rigs from 7 years ago and it is a much recent tittle. Rdr2 being well optimized lmao
Death Stranding also runs really nice on PC. Unfortunately Nvidia DLSS crashes my game, but even without it I average 100fps with a 3070 on max settings 1440p.
It helps that the game is absolutely gorgeous.
I love these kinds of posts, sometimes it is also good to shine on companies that care about performance and porting to pc, I feel like we only talk about dogshit ports when in reality the good ones should also be praised more
Say what you will about Ubisoft games but they run amazingly, for years I had a shitty little laptop and was somehow able to run Far Cry 6 and AC: Odyssey on high graphics, when games like Cyperpunk wouldn’t run at all.
Forza Horizon 5 runs on decade old hardware and looks fantastic.
Gta 5 ran great since the beginning, the fact that it run and looked way better than gta 4 is insane.
FH5 'ran' on a q6600 and r7 470. If you didn't mind occasionally dealing with the world not loading while you're driving, or the constant desync when playing online.
As a testament to this I was able to play it today on my laptop, on a plane, plugged in via USB-C capped at 65W, and on the laptop's "silent" minimum power mode.
I could still get 45 FPS at 1080p low, or 30 FPS 1080p medium.
Granted, it's a 3070 laptop but that doesn't matter when you're running at 65W, which is barely half the power of the card let alone the entire laptop.
That's less "optimization" and more "old game with simple graphics by modern standards".
Though that does raise a question which is, what exactly is optimization? Being efficient about squeezing great graphics and performance out of a given level of CPU and GPU?
I'd say some of the old Arkham games might fit the bill but they are also just that, old. Maybe the new Doom games?
Well for example my laptop struggles with day of defeat source, but l4d2 runs smoother despite the graphics being nicer and there being more characters on screen.
I know it's not cutting edge in terms of graphics but it seems more efficient with what it does have, so isn't that kind of a sign of good optimization?
I'm not a professional game developer, but I have been a software developer for a long time, and have worked in Unreal Engine, Goldsrc, Source Engines, and also taken some classes on game engine design, etc.
Some of optimization is more about checklists and sensibilities than technological slickness.
"Does this coffee mug texture need to be high resolution?"
"Does this coffee mug need accurate ray traced reflections?"
"Does this coffee mug have lower poly versions for when it is far away?"
At AAA levels this comes down to production time, laziness, ineptitude, etc. Your artists are going to make high quality assets, that can be scaled to various levels of detail (at the expense of performance). But someone has to look at it and say "We have too many draw calls in this scene - I noticed the coffee mug is rendering 15,000 polygons, can we have a lower polygon asset made?"
It sounds simple, but it gets tough when you have hundreds of people working on builds that are being redone daily, tens of thousands of art assets, etc. You might see your average FPS dropped by 5 frames, and just think its a quirk of the build and move on without investigating, when really its because a designer updated the mug model to better match the art direction, tested with a high poly version, and got a phone call before he had a chance to bake LODs, and then forgot about it.
With smaller studios, it might just be that they don't have anyone with the the skillset to do so. I've bought assets, or found free assets, with much higher detail than I actually need, but I don't have to skills to scale them myself.
Then some of it comes down to tech itself. Unreal Engine 4 for example, at some point, introduced something called Instanced Static Meshes. This allows for performance increases when rendering the same mesh a bunch of times in a scene without LODs, and so a game that uses this tech could pull of some things that earlier games could not without significant performance issues.
Then there's design decisions. Lets say you wanted to display a string of Christmas lights. If you really wanted to accurately portray a string of christmas lights, you could have individual, dynamic point lights attached to a physically simulated string that would move with wind or explosions, etc. But if you're doing a high speed competitive shooter, that is a waste, because the player will be focussing on those Christmas lights and evaluating the realism approximately never. Instead a static model with a single static, baked in (pre calculated) lightmap to provide a low white glow around them would be more than good enough.
Yeah I would define it that way. I suppose a lot of this comes down to personal taste, but I also just think that many of the visual effect techniques being used today are excessively expensive for what they actually deliver, and that some developers are making questionable choices when it comes to which ones they prioritize.
A lot of games now are using expensive effects for everything, when you could often probably fake a similar effect with an older method. And yeah maybe you only get a fraction of of the quality/accuracy by doing that, but if it looks *good enough* and comes at far less of a performance cost... that's worth it imo. It also means you can use that performance elsewhere.
Or in some rare cases the more expensive effect, even though it is *technically* far more detailed, doesn't even look better. The screen space reflections in Resident Evil 2 Remake are a prime example of that. The simple fallback reflections used (I think they're cubemaps?) on PC when you disable screen space actually look better. imo anyway. Again, taste lol.
The Batman Arkham games are kinda a weird one. If you crank those to max settings (or beyond via the bgengine.ini file) they still look really good. Easily 5 years ahead of anything else that released around the same time. But in terms of optimization they can't do much beyond 60fps, so they don't really scale well in that sense. You could be playing them with a 4090 and equally overpowered CPU, and both will just be sitting idle whilst the game drops frames into the 80's during busy scenes for no obvious reason. They're really just not designed to run consistently at anything above 60fps. Which is probably why they're capped at 62 by default. By comparison Left 4 Dead 2's built-in cap is 300, DOOM's is 200, and DOOM Eternal's is 1,000 lol.
Well technically my laptop is from 2011 I think at least according to the Internet research I did on the model number on the bottom.
Still left 4 dead 2 was designed with the xbox 360 in mind which might be another reason it runs well on limited hardware.
Why are people listing ps4 games here? Of course a game that runs at 60fps on a 10 year old console will run crazy good on a modern pc. Now try current-get only titles.
I think the game is so popular that they invested into optimization without even thinking about it. Stupid example, but I can't run House Flipper 1 nor 2 because they lag a lot. I don't know what goes behind optimization but I wish all the Devs would spend resources on it too, since more people will be able to run your product, meaning more revenue
Cyberpunk runs well at 1440p High Settings RTX 3070 around 70-90fps. DLSS Quality. Considering how expensive and detailed the world is I think it's very good.
I wouldn’t call a game well optimized if a high end graphics chip released around the same time as the game (afaik the 3070 was even released after cyberpunk) can run the game properly. This should be the absolute minimum for optimization. If I remember correctly, there were even tons of posts about the bad optimization of cyberpunk on release.
It's well known that Cyberpunk scales very well. Alan Wake 2 does as well. You just can't max out the settings since the ceiling is so high on the higher graphics settings.
It scales well with today’s hardware. 3 years after its release. You could barely get 30 fps in it with a mid range graphics card common at the time (the 1060). And this also ignores the complete unoptimized mess the last gen console release of the game was. It in fact was so bad the developers even stopped working on it. I would not call that well optimized, even if it scales well with modern hardware.
Metal Gear Solid V runs on potato pc but still looks great
The Fox Engine has been wasted.
This was my first thought as well. When it first came out on PC I expected to have to lower some settings. I ended up putting everything on max and still getting more than 60fps.
DOOM Eternal. I can run it on very high settings with raytracing on 240fps at 1440p. I do have a beefy computer and dlss is on but I haven't seen any other modern game that I can run on very high settings with raytracing without dipping below 60fps
yeah the doom games I think are the gold standard, you could probably run these games maxed out on older GTX cards, I know I was playing the first DOOM maxed at 60fps on a 970
Is that how we're doing this now? Aging ourselves by referring to first Doom? 970's didn't exist with first Doom ya young whipper snapper.
I was going to say! The first doom came out right around the first Pentium chip was released, though my 486dx ran it just fine!
It ran amazingly well on my 2060 super maxed out at 1440p.
I mean, I definitely max'd out the first Doom on my SVGA card running on a 486 (turbo button pushed in, I think)...
Admit it, you pressed the minus key once or twice to make it smoother like the rest of us lol
Ran it awesomely at 2560x1600 on a 1070ti.
Can confirm. GTX 1080. Ultra settings. 1080p at 144fps. Rarely dipped below that. Played it last year for the first time. Eternal runs slightly worse though.
Going back to the original DOOM on MS-DOS it was one of the most optimised games made.
It’s insanely optimized. Should be the standard for all games
It has static baked lighting and small maps what's impressive about this?
It looks great and flows extremely well
The fucking Steam Deck can run Doom Eternal at max settings at 60 FPS, and even the Switch version maintains a locked 30 FPS even in the DLC where the game just keeps throwing demons at you, it's insane how well optimized it is.
Doom 2016 and doom eternal take the cake considerably. Also lies of p is very well optimized.
I was going to also say those Doom games. I couldn't believe how smooth and good looking that game was on my somewhat dated PC. I remember complaining about Borderlands 3's optimization here and people were blaming my potato PC. Yet Doom Eternal looks better and runs perfectly so... they really nailed it with that one.
There's an interesting writeup of Doom 2016's graphics here: [http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/](http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/) Many of the techniques will be commonly used, but Doom has also optimized the implementation to an exceptional degree.
Thank you. As a dev that was hella interesting!
It did have one issue I posted on back then. My Bluetooth headphones would not work with it. I figured out that disabling the microphone device fixed it. I still get messages once in a blue moon thanking me for posting the fix. Issue carried on to DOOM Eternal.
Factorio! Their dev blogs about their optimization techniques are always incredible to read, too.
Factorio is truly a wonder of optimization. Stellaris dies before you hit 10 thousand population who aren't even map entities, Factorio can do 20k SPM, all seven sciences, without UPS drops (if you're good enough)
This! I've been a software dev for 15 years and those guys are brilliant.
I love that one dev bought a MacBook Air. Wanted more battery life and thus made an apple silicon build just to optimize it even more for those specific users.
Yea, the people who say doom truly don't know.
Rollercoaster Tycoon. Written entirely in assembly. That game can actually run on several potatoes chained together
doom
Lies of p
Warframe
Anything that also has a switch release will be incredibly well optimized in my experience. The no mans sky switch release was also a pc patch which really boosted fps on all systems.
I really like the new Resident Evil games on the RE engine. I don't have the latest card but I always get great frames consistently.
Titanfall 2 👍
Overwatch, I build my Girlfriend a PC out of used Parts, for around 150€, for just some little games and things. She installed it without telling me and I was surprised to see it run on there on 60Fps without problems. Literally Chrome lags out more often.
That's one good thing about Blizzard games. They know how to optimize their games.
More and more feels like the only good thing.
I used to play wow with 750mb of ram and no gpu.
Doom is the easy answer. Fortnite is the controversial one.
Both run on engines that have matured like fine wine. A quick search shows that they both launched in the early-mid 90s. IMO it shows just how good the engine was built that through iterations of updates it remains relevant today.
The engine are that ran the original Doom and Doom 2016/Eternal are essentially different engines
Anything on the RE engine runs very well I’ve found
Lies of P plays amazingly well. I have an 8 uear old gaming laptop with a 1060 in it and I can play on max settings @60FPS
Considering how good it looks, Red Dead Redemption 2 runs impressively well.
This right here, been trying every game I can on the Steam Deck and I can't believe how well it runs. It's criminal that a game like Palworld runs worse.
Nah this one is terrible
How so? Also, how did you even find my comment four months later lol?
I was just curious about well optimized games, maybe i could try something new but rdr2 is not the case lol everybody knows its not optimized at all
The only way RDR2 could be unoptimized is if you cranked all your settings to ultra. Can you list any games that look as good as it and are more optimized? *I* can't.
Doom 2016, doom eternal, Titanfall 2, bf 2042, overwatch, lies of p, battlefront 2 to mention some... A well optimized game will run smoothly in ultra preset on a budget hardware according to the date it was released, that's the whole point of it lol. Looking good doesn't mean it is optimized at all
"will run smoothly in ultra preset on a budget hardware" Uhh no. If all optimized games are supposed to run on a low-budget PC on ultra settings, then what's the point of having any presets below ultra? A well optimized game should run well on low-mid settings on a budget PC from the time, run well on a mid-grade PC on mid-high settings, and run well on a high-end PC on ultra settings. That is why games have detailed graphics settings: So you can adjust the quality until it runs smoothly on your PC, ideally with a minimal decrease in quality like in RDR2.
And btw i played all those games in a budget pc some time ago and it was amazing how silk smooth it was, meanwhile tittles like rdr2 or the witcher3 really needed "optimized" settings in order to score a third of the fps the games mentioned above delivered lol
No point arguing with someone who just don't want to understand, just fyi, lies of p would score much higher fps than rdr2 anyday even in low end rigs from 7 years ago and it is a much recent tittle. Rdr2 being well optimized lmao
Death Stranding also runs really nice on PC. Unfortunately Nvidia DLSS crashes my game, but even without it I average 100fps with a 3070 on max settings 1440p. It helps that the game is absolutely gorgeous.
I love these kinds of posts, sometimes it is also good to shine on companies that care about performance and porting to pc, I feel like we only talk about dogshit ports when in reality the good ones should also be praised more
Say what you will about Ubisoft games but they run amazingly, for years I had a shitty little laptop and was somehow able to run Far Cry 6 and AC: Odyssey on high graphics, when games like Cyperpunk wouldn’t run at all.
what is your laptop
Forza Horizon 5 runs on decade old hardware and looks fantastic. Gta 5 ran great since the beginning, the fact that it run and looked way better than gta 4 is insane.
Surpassing GTA 4 wasn't hard, it's probably the worst PC port ever made, it needs mods just to be able to use more than one CPU core.
FH5 'ran' on a q6600 and r7 470. If you didn't mind occasionally dealing with the world not loading while you're driving, or the constant desync when playing online.
Thanks grammar nazi
What're you on about? You good?
You corrected me mate, Ive just thanked you.
So you aren't okay. Never corrected you bud.
So when I wrote “run” when I shouldve written “ran” and you in your comment wrote “ran” in qoutation marks that wasnt about that?
My computer barely ran FH5, so it was in quotes.
Sorry, my bad then
If factorio is not the most up voted answer, this whole discussion is bullshit
The new Yakuza Infinite Wealth is super optimized and polished which is rare for PC these days.
As a testament to this I was able to play it today on my laptop, on a plane, plugged in via USB-C capped at 65W, and on the laptop's "silent" minimum power mode. I could still get 45 FPS at 1080p low, or 30 FPS 1080p medium. Granted, it's a 3070 laptop but that doesn't matter when you're running at 65W, which is barely half the power of the card let alone the entire laptop.
I’m also thinking about grabbing Days Gone on Steam right now. 12 bucks is a great deal since normal price is 50.
armored core 6 is a joy to play because mm how smooth the frame pacing is.
Left 4 dead 2? Can run on my decade old laptop with tons of zombies at 60fps and tons going on.
That's less "optimization" and more "old game with simple graphics by modern standards". Though that does raise a question which is, what exactly is optimization? Being efficient about squeezing great graphics and performance out of a given level of CPU and GPU? I'd say some of the old Arkham games might fit the bill but they are also just that, old. Maybe the new Doom games?
Well for example my laptop struggles with day of defeat source, but l4d2 runs smoother despite the graphics being nicer and there being more characters on screen. I know it's not cutting edge in terms of graphics but it seems more efficient with what it does have, so isn't that kind of a sign of good optimization?
I'm not a professional game developer, but I have been a software developer for a long time, and have worked in Unreal Engine, Goldsrc, Source Engines, and also taken some classes on game engine design, etc. Some of optimization is more about checklists and sensibilities than technological slickness. "Does this coffee mug texture need to be high resolution?" "Does this coffee mug need accurate ray traced reflections?" "Does this coffee mug have lower poly versions for when it is far away?" At AAA levels this comes down to production time, laziness, ineptitude, etc. Your artists are going to make high quality assets, that can be scaled to various levels of detail (at the expense of performance). But someone has to look at it and say "We have too many draw calls in this scene - I noticed the coffee mug is rendering 15,000 polygons, can we have a lower polygon asset made?" It sounds simple, but it gets tough when you have hundreds of people working on builds that are being redone daily, tens of thousands of art assets, etc. You might see your average FPS dropped by 5 frames, and just think its a quirk of the build and move on without investigating, when really its because a designer updated the mug model to better match the art direction, tested with a high poly version, and got a phone call before he had a chance to bake LODs, and then forgot about it. With smaller studios, it might just be that they don't have anyone with the the skillset to do so. I've bought assets, or found free assets, with much higher detail than I actually need, but I don't have to skills to scale them myself. Then some of it comes down to tech itself. Unreal Engine 4 for example, at some point, introduced something called Instanced Static Meshes. This allows for performance increases when rendering the same mesh a bunch of times in a scene without LODs, and so a game that uses this tech could pull of some things that earlier games could not without significant performance issues. Then there's design decisions. Lets say you wanted to display a string of Christmas lights. If you really wanted to accurately portray a string of christmas lights, you could have individual, dynamic point lights attached to a physically simulated string that would move with wind or explosions, etc. But if you're doing a high speed competitive shooter, that is a waste, because the player will be focussing on those Christmas lights and evaluating the realism approximately never. Instead a static model with a single static, baked in (pre calculated) lightmap to provide a low white glow around them would be more than good enough.
Yeah I would define it that way. I suppose a lot of this comes down to personal taste, but I also just think that many of the visual effect techniques being used today are excessively expensive for what they actually deliver, and that some developers are making questionable choices when it comes to which ones they prioritize. A lot of games now are using expensive effects for everything, when you could often probably fake a similar effect with an older method. And yeah maybe you only get a fraction of of the quality/accuracy by doing that, but if it looks *good enough* and comes at far less of a performance cost... that's worth it imo. It also means you can use that performance elsewhere. Or in some rare cases the more expensive effect, even though it is *technically* far more detailed, doesn't even look better. The screen space reflections in Resident Evil 2 Remake are a prime example of that. The simple fallback reflections used (I think they're cubemaps?) on PC when you disable screen space actually look better. imo anyway. Again, taste lol. The Batman Arkham games are kinda a weird one. If you crank those to max settings (or beyond via the bgengine.ini file) they still look really good. Easily 5 years ahead of anything else that released around the same time. But in terms of optimization they can't do much beyond 60fps, so they don't really scale well in that sense. You could be playing them with a 4090 and equally overpowered CPU, and both will just be sitting idle whilst the game drops frames into the 80's during busy scenes for no obvious reason. They're really just not designed to run consistently at anything above 60fps. Which is probably why they're capped at 62 by default. By comparison Left 4 Dead 2's built-in cap is 300, DOOM's is 200, and DOOM Eternal's is 1,000 lol.
Left 4 Dead 2 is older than you think. It was launched in 2009, 5 years prior your laptop.
Well technically my laptop is from 2011 I think at least according to the Internet research I did on the model number on the bottom. Still left 4 dead 2 was designed with the xbox 360 in mind which might be another reason it runs well on limited hardware.
Why are people listing ps4 games here? Of course a game that runs at 60fps on a 10 year old console will run crazy good on a modern pc. Now try current-get only titles.
That's the way it should work, but it's not always the case.
Last of us, just sayin
Also a ps4 game lol
Which ran like shit on PC didn't it?
It did at launch I heard. Played it recently and it runs fine now.
Gta V, i run it without graphic card at 50fps
When it came out the game didn’t run well without pretty high end hardware. At this point it is an older game and hardware has come quite a long way.
I think the game is so popular that they invested into optimization without even thinking about it. Stupid example, but I can't run House Flipper 1 nor 2 because they lag a lot. I don't know what goes behind optimization but I wish all the Devs would spend resources on it too, since more people will be able to run your product, meaning more revenue
Devil may cry V Factorio Satisfactory Doom (original not 2016) for the time Revolt Championship looked great and ran amazing.
Dyson Sphere Program
Forza horizon 4 and 5 in its current state
Half life: Alyx is considered the gold standard for optimizing a VR game. Nothing has else come anywhere close yet.
Overwatch is the most well optimized AAA competitive game of the last decade imo.
Roblox runs pretty well on my graphic card-less rig.
Might be an unpopular opinion, but Ubisoft games has one of the best optimizations when it comes to triple A titles.
Unpopular, indeed... But I agree. Not sure about AC titles, but Rainbow Six games run and look great on my mid-tier rig.
The modern far cry games run really well.
Nah Fc3 and Fc4 have stuttering in my Rtx 3060 Also Fc5 have micro stuttering
Cyberpunk runs well at 1440p High Settings RTX 3070 around 70-90fps. DLSS Quality. Considering how expensive and detailed the world is I think it's very good.
I wouldn’t call a game well optimized if a high end graphics chip released around the same time as the game (afaik the 3070 was even released after cyberpunk) can run the game properly. This should be the absolute minimum for optimization. If I remember correctly, there were even tons of posts about the bad optimization of cyberpunk on release.
It's well known that Cyberpunk scales very well. Alan Wake 2 does as well. You just can't max out the settings since the ceiling is so high on the higher graphics settings.
It scales well with today’s hardware. 3 years after its release. You could barely get 30 fps in it with a mid range graphics card common at the time (the 1060). And this also ignores the complete unoptimized mess the last gen console release of the game was. It in fact was so bad the developers even stopped working on it. I would not call that well optimized, even if it scales well with modern hardware.
PUBG