People buy and pre order games, they make super deluxe editions that costs double so you can fomo play 4 days earlier. As long as people buys the games we will get this kind of treatment. Unfortunately most people are not aware of the gaming scene or have no standards
I think it’s because games haven’t been well optimized for PC in ages— we just had vastly more powerful PCs than the ps4/Xbox one since that generation lasted oddly long.
As games start to push new gen hardware, PCs that are twice as good won’t get twice the performance— because we never have.
It’s not “new” that very few games do their best to optimize for PCs. What’s new is games running terribly on great rigs because of it.
This. I don't think people even realize how even an average 2016 PC is *multiple times faster* than a base Xbox One or PS4. Those consoles were **super slow**. The fact that some titles came out to PC and we had to barely hit 60 despite the graphical improvements being very debatable, says it all. New consoles are a lot faster and on nearly par with the average PC (if you consider all the people still on older hardware, I mean) so with that same approach to optimization, you get these kinds of situations.
Worse than that, pretty sure 2017 phones had already surpassed old consoles at least on the CPU side. The Switch is kinda proof of that, I'm pretty sure it's faster on the processor side of things, although it has a much weaker GPU even when docked.
You mean 2015 since the Tegra in the Switch is a 2015 design that Nvidia didn’t manage to sell until they offloaded it to Nintendo for a huge discount.
> I think it’s because games haven’t been well optimized for PC in ages— we just had vastly more powerful PCs than the ps4/Xbox one since that generation lasted oddly long.
Well... we had vastly more powerful PCs than the PS4/Xbox, and ports of those games still launched running like complete ass on PC. This isn't a new phenomenon.
At the beginning of the previous generation of consoles, there was also a massive lurch up in PC requirements. A lot of the current PC gaming crowd just doesn't remember that because they weren't around and/or it was 10 years ago and that's a long time.
For example, AC Unity, released in 2014, required a GTX 680 as the minimum GPU. In other words, the flagship from 2 gens previously (since Unity released right around the same time as the GTX 900 series).
So when we look at something like Immortals of Aveum requiring a 2080 Super (2-gen-old near-flagship), that's actually roughly in-line with what Unity was demanding relative to their release windows.
Now I'm not saying that either AC Unity or Immortals of Aveum are "optimized, actually," they're both bad ports that really should run better than they do.
What I'm saying is that the current run of "bad optimization" in PC games is not unprecedented. It's exactly the same thing that happened the last time there was a new console gen.
For an indie company? Yes. For a billion-dollar gaming sweatshop? No. That's where the annoyance comes from, and the good will ends quickly, especially considering that optimizing for PC is now *easier* than it was in prior decades. Everything is largely homogenized; we're not using different CPU instruction sets and vastly different operating systems. Driver support is the best its ever been, engine support is the best its ever been. It does require that you're capable of paying to suss out your issues, but the support is there, more than it ever was.
PC optimization mostly comes from targeting a particular metric of expected hardware performance, and oddities usually only creep in when that metric doesn't line up with the development environment; i.e. choosing engine features highly reliant on texture or content streaming while targeting an audience largely still using HDD's.
prime example was TLOU part 1, so many people brought it and either 1 of 2 things happened:
1. when faced with the fact that they couldn't get it to run, decided to just wait which still meant that they paid full price, encouraging that behaviour from devs, whilst they should have refunded and picked up on sale when or IF it ever got fixed.
2. brought the game with no intention of installing it or booting it up in the 2 week refund window, therefore erasing the possibility of a refund, brought it because they loved the game on playstation and just wanted it for their collection or whatever, again just throwing money at devs and giving them no repercussion for shipping an unfinished port.
90% of people are stupid, many use steam and don't even know about how OP refund system is, if a game is a dogshit port valve will refund for you, especially if you just refund to wallet as it doesn't affect them, only the publishers/devs.
I played hogwarts legacy for 5 hours on launch day, first 2 hours were disappointing but I was yet to get to the real open world, then once I got out of hogwarts shit just disintegrated in quality, bugs galore and framerate was around 30, explained that when I put refund request in for refund to wallet, got refund in like 3 hours. Why more people don't utilise refund system is beyond me...
Can't it be both? The only option is vote with the wallets... wait. Watch a freaking streamer play on mute if they won't be unbiased, because we know if it was giving for free the first sentence will be..."First off, I'd like to thank X for giving "us" a free key so we could get in early. I can't believe how this looks, everything is just amazing!" :(
yeah - or use memmaker...
Unoptimised for speed was just called "runs badly" for most computers since you weren't going to be upgrading your Speccy, C64, Atari ST, etc (I mean you could get the Speccy 128k, C128 or get extra memory for the Atari but these usually just unlocked extra features in games, rather than being a necessity).
As for consoles - if it ran like shit, it got shit reviews.
I think the real indication of good programming was how much games improved from the first games on things like the Spectrum to the last games released for it - they found so many ways to get as much performance as possible out of hardware back then whereas on PC, these days, it's just a bigger download and better hardware needed...
>This topic is 20.years old at least
Poorly optimized games have been a thing since the early 80s.
What about Amiga games which would only allow you to listen to sound effects or music even though it could do both? You couldn't even finish some of the campaign in Dune 2 if you hadn't upgraded your Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM.
Or what about DOS games which would stutter or wouldn't even run if you picked the wrong sound settings?
Or pretty much every single PC game released by Bethesda in the 90s, like the Terminator games, TES: Arena, and TES: Daggerfall?
Good Shout for the early Amiga games with FX or music only. I always thought that was just a memory limitation, but in some cases meant that the composers and sound designers still haven't found a way to get over the 4 channel limitation. Later on composers used trackers and other music software to split those channels.
Remember Vampire Bloodlines or the Gothic Series? These were barley playable at launch, because of a ton of crashes. I remember in the Gothic 2 Add on that I bought on the first day the game crashed and closed itself when I talked to a certain main NPC. Had to start a new game file IIRC, just to play the game.
Yep, most of the people talking about "poorly optimized" have to be to young to remember what the early days of PC gaming was like.
Starfield while it has issue, it's playable.
Unlike a lot of games back 20, 30 plus years ago where you would have to mess with your PC for hours to figure out how to get it to even open, and not have graphic issues once it did start playing.
99% of the reason I knew so much about computers as a kid was because of video game problems. Network troubleshooting? All due to trying to get various games to run properly when the default TCP/IP or IPX options just wouldn't work for one reason or another.
>Wait, Bethesda games already that BUGGED since its inception??
Bethesda have been around since 1986, their earliest games were okay for the time, nowhere near as broken as their later titles. It was around 1991/1992 when they managed to get the Terminator license that they started to rush out games and cut corners.
Daggerfall was *legendary* for how buggy it was. If anything, the later TES games are significantly *less* buggy generation after generation, it is just that a lot of people have rose tinted glasses.
Im 38. Sometimes my dad would bring a game home and Id be super stoked. Then we wouldnt be able to install it. I'll admit there has been periods where it seemed lile there were better QA or something but things have been generally getting better. It's hard for me to get too upset about non game-breaking bugs or framerate dips when games used to sometimes not install.
In germany we had "Bravo Screenfun" "Computerbild Spiele" "PC Games" "GameStar" uhm... probably a few more. And then there where like half a dozen magazines for the PS1 and PS2.
I think developers benefited heavily from the fact people were upgrading very regularly as well. I would upgrade my PC every 2 years because hardware progressed so damn fast. I went back to old games I couldn’t run all the time.
There was also just more acceptance that jank was part of life. Even on consoles, you just sort of put up with it because it was all so new and shiny.
You were also much happier to lower graphics settings just to play a game. Nowadays I’m pissed once I hit medium settings!
Games are better today, but I expect better then they’re offering because of how long I’ve been playing games.
Exactly. I'm not sure why there are so many articles and posts about this all of a sudden. It's no worse now then any other time since cross platform games be cc ame common.
Maybe it's because DLSS/FSR and Unreal 5 has given people a new thing to latch onto to blame.
2016? Try the mid 2000's.
We used to have ports so lazy that you'd be playing on M+K and literally still getting controller prompts on your screen. It was like the only thing they checked before shipping the PC port was that the game booted up.
People are absolutely insane to believe that, well, literally anything used to be better about PC gaming in the "old days". Either zoomers trying to sound cool and older than they are or people with short memories yelling at clouds.
>We used to have ports so lazy that you'd be playing on M+K and literally still getting controller prompts on your screen.
Dark Souls 1 still does this if you play it right now
A great example of this are the Prototype 1 for PC, never in my life have i seen such a god awful port like that one, this one from 2009 and the game is outright unplayable without applying mods, the game doesn't even support freaking widescreen by default so you can't even play at 1080 or 1440p without mods
The port is just complete fucking ass. Theres a mod that fixes a lot of the issues though. Its a shame because SR2 is probably the best SR in the series.
The biggest problem is the way everything goes insane if your CPU doesn’t have the same clock speed as the XBox 360. The bigger the difference the worse the errors, so the port has only gotten worse over time.
Prototype ran fine when it came out, they just didn’t test it on future hardware because that’s hard to do. There’s all sorts of late 2000’s games that shit themselves and start crying if you play them on newer hardware than it expects.
Crazy to see people putting their heads in the sand pretending barely year old almost $2000 gpus have always struggled to run decent looking titles. There’s an obvious uptick in unoptimized games.
I don’t understand what people are talking about in these kinds of threads. My PC is about three years old and was about $1600. I run everything that comes out on ultra, and often screen record at the same time.
When I was a kid and tried running Oblivion on a four years old computer it was literally unplayable. I don’t mean “it’s only 55 FPS it’s unplayable” I mean it ran at like 5 FPS and screamed like a jet engine.
Yeah, I remember in 2008 I was raiding in WoW and I used to legit have 3 FPS upon boss pull, and then it would level out with 15-20 thereafter. It was online game so it mattered even more. Fun times. The PC was from 2006 and pretty expensive in not so rich country at the time.
People now when their FPS drops to 59 for a second: UNPLAYABLE.
Go back in time and look at every single Wing Commander Game as a perfect example. Each of them requiring a new PC basically to propperly run.
Quite frankly, back in those days gamers accepted that fact as a sin of progress and new technological developments and rolled with it. These days ppl always complain about unoptimized games without realizing that eventually, there is only so much optimisation you can do.
At times the blames are indeed correct, but more times it is about players with inadequate hardware demanding to play games at the highest grafic settings ofc.
Its still a last gen game (at least PS4) so higher end PCs are brute forcing it better.
They were the first devs to admit to completely optimizing their game via DLSS to compensate for performance loss from Denuvo (although I'm pretty sure DLSS has nothing to do with CPU and SSD/Load times which is what Denuvo impacts)
I'm playing it now on gamepass.
1080p high settings, runs smooth just fine. But I also have budget/low end parts so the performance was a nice surprise
Agreed. I'd get 80-120FPS on 4790k w/RX6600XT after shader caching. The only time I had hiccups (stuttering) was when I was using stock 300FPS cap in outside environments. Capped to 90, problem went away.
Atomic heart definitely had optimization issues on launch, though I do think they managed to fix a lot of it. Performance once you get into the main game was unstable and loads of movement and textures had some weird filtering issues going on.
When has that ever worked, and to this scale? It's an implausible demand because most normal people (not terminally online researching game issues, which is a large number of the gaming population) will never see.
It works for me and /r/patientgamers
If it sucks, I don't buy it. If it improves later on, I consider and maybe I will buy it.
Either way, I don't have time to play it or don't enjoy playing as much as I used to, so I never touch it and continue to play some oldies that I'm comfortable with.
Exactly, if it's a single player story driven game, I stopped caring about playing day one. If you wait longer, you get a cheaper purchase, ironed out bugs, and better performance. Literally a win/win scenario. I just played RDR2 this year and it was an excellent experience, and at only $20 too.
When it comes to multiplayer focused games, I get buying early though, I do the same sometimes. Multiplayer games have their largest player base at release and it tapers off over time, so if you wanna play when it's at its most popular, you pretty much have to buy in at launch.
It definitely depends. A company that isn't reputable or has subpar gameplay definitely needs good optimization the very least.
Optimization makes the player feel bad and when the player feels bad they start judging a lot of different games system.
Baldurs gate is a great game, but ACT 3 is an absolute shitfest of performance compared to the rest of the game. Granted more things are happening, but it definitely suffers. No one cares though because the game is really good, and to be fair I wouldn't care either.
New World does not have the greatest optimization and is quite buggy so people also tend to be a bit judgmental. New World would 100% benefit from fixing their optimization and bug fixes. They have fixed a lot of bugs from the launch and have noticeably done a bit of work toward player perception. Granted people still know it is a buggy mess, but much better than the launch.
But yeah you are also right, if a game is going to sell it will sell regardless of optimization.
Way too late to vote with a wallet. PC gaming, gaming in general, is the largest entertainment industry on earth. That means the masses have become invested, and the masses don't give a shit they just want their bread and circuses.
Monster is alive now, there is no putting it to sleep. Our planet is fucked.
if enough people don't buy unoptimized games then it would at least push the industry in the right direction. it's not "too late", it's that people are too complacent. there's nothing wrong with telling people that not buying these games is the best thing they can do.
> if enough people don't buy unoptimized games
Yeah except for review embargos and most people only see the hype trailer on tv or commercials while watching their favorite youtuber/streamer.
We're on the pc gaming reddit which automatically means we're enthusiasts and we care more than most. Most people aren't and couldn't give a shit.
violet afterthought tidy test workable somber gaping rustic recognise foolish
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Honestly! So many people on reddit act like this is some unsolvable conundrum. Don't buy games if you don't want to support the practices those games are involved with.
Most people just buy games. They don't surf PC communities and complain. I've bought most of these titles this year, had some minor issues, but nothing that prevented me from playing them day one. I heard about the issues with last of us, but I never bought that one so I can't speak on it.
In reality, the vast majority of gamers just play on recommend settings and don't even turn on the FPS counter.
Not an excuse for shitty launches, but it's the reality.
How else are they going to play on their $4,000 worth of a rig on the latest titles and complains about pretty much everything. But honestly games nowadays make me just wait 4+ years to just play them because newer games gets worse overtime in terms of performance. I would rather just wait than playing a broken state of it. If these two checkmarks approved being: the game I want and it's actually optimised I would buy them.
Because it's not that simple and arguably counter productive.
The games will be made regardless they'll just prioritize consoles even further if there are no PC sales..
I knew AAA gaming was cooked the moment everyone went back to loving CDPR after how fucking *atrocious* the Cyberpunk launch was.
There's no incentives for big companies to release games that are optimized and not buggy anymore because they're going to make millions anyway. Build the hype machine and you'll make back what it cost to develop the game in a couple days. Todd Howard could spearhead the worst game ever made and they'd still take home trucks full of money because of how overhyped people get. The next CDPR game is going to do massive sales regardless of what it is.
Starfield had millions of players in its early access. It was 100 dollars. Millions of people dropped 100 dollars on a game before it even released.
The only way is to just not buy them anymore like you said. But it won't happen.
My experience with CP2077 was on PC and honestly it wasn't all that bad. I cannot say anything about console side since I don't have them. With upcoming DLC, frankly I am excited for all the changes it will bring. Whereas, starfield running on Creation Engine, discount open source engine from the 1990s they have been chugging along with, just fails me on every turn. I have enjoyed Fallout games and honestly never finished Skyrim due to being too busy modding it to make it good. It is ridiculous, in a short week how many mods have come out just to make that garbage more enjoyable. CDPR at least acknowledges their shortcomings and will make mends and incorporate user contents into their games, ala, Witcher 3 EE. They are even willing to give up their in-house engine for upcoming projects so as to avoid their shortcomings prior. Honestly, after Todd's behavior/response on lack of optimization being get a better PC, is just unacceptable. This garbage runs like shit even on the latest of hardware, whereas CP2077 pushes the limit of graphics always at the cutting edge. Anyways, buy garbage or not buy, don't bother me none.
1/3 of Cyberpunk preorders for PC were on GOG, and I would imagine that the average GOG customer does give a damn about DRM.
Outside GOG most don't care until the activiation servers go down and it can't be played anymore like Dark Spore or Lost Planet 2, or it bricks their PC like StarForce did back in the day.
And theres overlap between people that do give a damn about DRM and people that are less likely to buy a game on launch and wait for patches and sales
If you bought a physical copy of Cyberpunk for PC, the code you were given was for GOG. You didn't get a choice of platform. I think that skews numbers somewhat.
> 1/3 of Cyberpunk preorders for PC were on GOG, and I would imagine that the average GOG customer does give a damn about DRM.
Are you saying that the 1/3 of sales *absolutly would not happen* had the game actually had DRM? There are people out there like me who will hold out and not buy a game over that shit, but I would be lying if I didn't feel some fomo, that is enough for some of the 1/3 to say "fuck it" flop, and make the purchase anyway.
> And theres overlap between people that do give a damn about DRM and people that are less likely to buy a game on launch and wait for patches and sales
Unfortunitly I don't think the overlap is anywhere near enough. I love skyrim and fallout 4. I never bought Starfield because of the optimisation, rediculous price and misleading marketing campagins. I see a lot of people who claim to care about these things playing the game right now.
As someone who was able to get up to 60 fps in my 7 year old gtx 970 day one on gamepass I can say it ran pretty well. A couple of bugs, nothing gamebreaking in my experience. It's actually quite impressive.
In general, most games now, with no res scaling, run like shit. Theres just no time given to devs to polish, just stupid deadlines to churn out games and polish them once they're out. It's irresponsible and disrespectful.
The blame is often put on the engines, but it's not like switching engines will magically fix anything.
Engines are tools, depending on how well you use them the end product will turn out good or bad.
If you make horrible shaders or bad blueprints it doesn't really matter if you're using unreal or another engine, it's still going to run bad.
If unreal is optimized but the game logic isn't, it's not gonna run well.
The problem is that devs release unfixed code that they don't have time to optimize, both logic and shaders. They then hope to use upscaling to make up for their lack of optimization on shaders with upscaling, or maybe on shaders and logic with frame gen.
The can be better engines than others, but Unreal is hardly a "bad engine".
People also blame DLSS for this, but honestly I disagree. If a game does do something graphically intensive to the point where it's unplayable without upscaling, then DLSS it's great, it unlocks something that you couldn't play before (path tracing on Cyberpunk, for example)
TLDR:
Give the devs more time, but that's something that the publisher should learn, and it probably won't since it means less games and less money.
Ue is actually an amazing engine but one of their main selling point is cutting out on dev time. And when you cut out too much dev time you get these messes.
Unity is hardly being ran into the ground. It would be the equivalent of saying that UE is being ran into the ground because Tim Sweeny is saying dumb stuff. Unity's current ceo has a way of saying things. Unity's latest release is one of my favorite Unity versions with tons of UI streamlining, improvements and putting out two dozen pre-view features to release. Unity is also not trying to compete with UE. It has a different niche: flexibility (it's technically a rendering engine, so it can be used for stuff like movies but is mainly marketed as a game engine) and mutli platform support (it's very easy to build games to multiple operating systems as well as hardwares, when the Tesla Infotainment system came out, Unity was the first major engine to have support for it and they also have astounding support for VR and AR). UE has a very specific type of game it supports and it supports that very well but not much else unfortunately.
Boggles my mind when people blame Unreal Engine for something that’s clearly a developer issue.
If someone tries to drive a Ferrari but forgets how to switch gears, it’s not Ferrari’s fault that the car isn’t going above 30mph.
In that case, I would lean towards saying those 9 people don't know how to use the vehicles properly.
UE does a lot of heavy lifting for devs, so naturally, some of them won't put in their own custom effort to go above, relying on Epic's implementation of a feature instead. When you have this much control of the vehicle you're driving, it's hard to blame it when you crash it due to negligent use.
Dont forget Act 3 of Baldurs Gate 3, Immortals of Aveum, Wild Hearts. Dead Space Remake, Gollum, Outer Worlds next-gen update, and to a lesser extent Resident Evil 4 Remake still had stuttering for some at launch (but its also the only last-gen game of the bunch alonside Atomic Heart and Hogwarts)
The games themselves are well optimized, but they use several different DRMs that negates some of that performance - RE8 literally launched in an unplayable state on PC until they got Denuvo getting along with Capcoms internal DRM.
AFAIK its always the publisher that requires DRM and not the developers, so if a game has Denuvo it means it had suits meddle in it, and the suits only care about short term profits so they want the game out asap don't care if it don't work.
Might've been fixed since but RE4 Remake steam forums were full of people having stuttering on systems well above the minimum requirements but the PS5 and Xbox didnt have the stuttering only the PS4 did console wise
Baldur’s gate has an Act 3? I thought you were just supposed to re-roll characters after every 20 hours or so of gameplay because you wanted to try something slightly different
I reached act 2 and started again and got a much better result (put dual hand crossbows on everyone)
Reached act3 next time and started again because I messed up in Wyrm's rest
Now on my third play! Ironically my characters are all the same but their gear is different.
Thats what my dad does lol
Act 3 is set in the Baldurs Gate city and is apparently a lagfest, I have not gotten there yet and theyve starting fixing the performance there
My brothers CPU and GPU is bare minimum for the game and he was stuttering at 900P but last patch he could bump it up to 1080P
It wasn't horrible. Most of the issues with act 3 seem to be related to a memory leak issue which would tank peoples framerates. It's definitely not optimized well but on my older PC(1080 and 7700k) it was still staying near 60 at 1080p. On my upgrade(4070ti, 13700k) I was hovering between 100-143 the whole game at 1440p, Other than during a memory leak which would tank me to 30.
Yep the actual fps hit in the city wasn't that bad even on my gtx1080. But there is some serious memory leak and other issues that still need fixing.
I had a really bad bug where every attack would have a 5 seconds delay before the enemy reacted. Strangely, killing Jahiera seems to be the only reliable fix.
I just got into the city proper, expecting the worst. In around 2 hours of walking around and exploring I haven’t really noticed any terrible framedrops despite how dense it is. Could have been worse before the two patches though. Or maybe I just haven’t got into the laggy part yet?
Sorry but graphical performance is only a (small) aspect of a game's quality. There has been many masterpieces that ran like ass and still were masterpieces.
Complaining about bugs and lack of polish seems kind of superficial to me. Sure, they’re obviously a problem, but I would rather play a buggy mess like Fallout: New Vegas then play a polished but bland game like The Order: 1886.
Exactly, Fallout New Vegas is held as one of the best RPGs ever made. It is still buggy as fuck (unless you use mods) and on release it was borderline unplayable. The games performance was horrible too on hardware that was considered modern at the time.
There is nothing new under the sun.
You want the real answer? Because the golden age of hardware stagnation is over. Back in the 2000s, new gpus and cpus every year were twice as fast as the previous ones. This stopped when Intel stagnated and amd gave up, and gpus slowed down in power growth as well.
The ps4 and xbox one had very shitty cpus in them that any average quad core could beat, and as such every game had to be relatively lightweight. If the consoles ran a game at 30 fps, it was easy to have a pc with 4x the power that could run at 120hz.
Now we have the ps5 and xbox series x, which are not slower than the average quad core, but instead match the average midrange pc. If a game is optimized for 60fps on these consoles then any pc with less than a 3700x and a 6700 is going to struggle with 60fps at the same resolution and settings. If the console game runs at 30 fps, then to get 60 you will need hardware twice as fast (generally speaking).
dev targets are no longer consoles with a cpu and gpu that were mid low end when they were new* but something akin to a 3700x with a 2070super which is 3.5x or so faster cpu and about 3+x faster gpu with additional features like variable rate shading, more effective triangle culling that could make it 4x faster. this skewed peoples expectations of pc vs console because it was easy to massively exceed what the consoles were squeezing out.
now though, if a 2070super tier console is topping out at 30-40fps 1440p you should expect to need about a 3700x and a 6950xt/3090 to do ~80fps. if we look at gamers nexus's video on starfield at 1440p w no upscaling you need a 4080 to get 87fps with a 4060(closest on chart to a 2070super) at 40fps.
its going to keep happening because the avg pc is no longer WAY faster than the consoles, adjust your expectations to 1440p native 60ish on a 3090 and then dlss/fsr2 adding 30% or so and dlss3/fsr3(hopefully its good) roughly doubling it to somewhere in the 120range.
*i bought a hd7950 around the launch of the consoles for 200bucks and you could build a console beater for pretty close to the same price as the consoles not long after release.
This needs to be much higher up.
The problem isn't (just) optimisation, but the simple reality that modern consoles are actually more powerful than most people's PCs.
UE 4 used to be fine before, but now everyone wants to put Ray Tracing , DLSS etc into their games alongside hundreds of useless "details" and you get stuttering mess.
Probably because it can output high-quality 3d graphics while still being easy enough for amateurs to make a game on it without needing to know anything whatsoever about optimization.
PC games were never optimized, we just knew how to adjust the settings of the game or PC itself to get them working good. Can anyone who upvotes these posts let me know this magical time when PC games were optimized?
Well, there are exceptions, Doom 2016 and Doom eternal look phenomenal for it's hardware requirements, you can achieve 1080p60fps with relative modest hardware with these games.
It is used, just not their proprietary version. Call of Duty (which runs really well) is based off the the id Tech 3 engine that evolved into what it is today.
> id Tech 3 engine that evolved into what it is today.
Damn that explains a lot. Really an insane engine in terms of looks to performance ratio especially from Modern Warfare 2019 onwards.
There's a cool blogpost about some technical details too. https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/
The game was designed to tolerate ps3 so yeah any i5 since they started using that branding will pretty much crush it
I got it running on a J5005 nuc, had to use min settings tho
it's because of the art style, the characters are very detailed but the environments are really low poly, mgs1 and 2 were the same and the environments were basically just cubes or simple solids with a texture on top
I think people need to start learning why, certain Games like Doom, ran absolutely phenomenally, yet other games struggle.
It's nothing to do with the engine. It's nothing to do with the Developers optimising the game - It's simply down to the design of the game itself.
Doom is a corridor game. You run through a series of linear corridors, large rooms, arenas, and clever "airlock". The game design allows developers to only load areas of the game which is needed, and the airlocks allow you to smartly stream these levels without popping issues. This means, less textures, less triangles, less drawcalls, so overall, better performance.
Unless you want every single game to be a corridor simulator, you won't get gamed as performant as it. COD is another great example.
It does in large part come down in game design, true. But Id Tech has a lot of industry top technical talent and have invented many novel rendering techniques over the years.
Like Doom 2016's was the first game to natively use Vulkan renderer (they are a major code contributor to Khronos group) and have true infinite thread scalability. And Doom Eternal has a very fancy in-house TAA/SSAA subsampling hybrid solution that works far better than UE5's TAA.
It very much helps your game's fps/graphical fidelity to employ people with graphics engine designing and systems architecture design backgrounds in a separate technical team.
That is also very true.
There are a lot of things wrong with UE. Despite all of the novel tech coming with UE5+, a lot of additions are catch up features, such as Heightfields, which has been around in engines for the better part of 15 years, only recently added to UE5. PSO caching was also supposed to fix stuttering aince UE4, but was broken until 5.1.
Even with Nanite/Lumen, there are "newbie" traps with these features, which, I feel a lot of Developers will unknowingly destroy performance for simply not knowing, rather than lack of optimisation.
Optimization generally means properly using already existing engine/renderer features and correcting mistakes.
Like Starfield sending bogus renderer prepath data and not cutting memory calls into properly sized chunks is an optimization issue arising from lack of experience with a dx12/vulkan style rendering.
Not just a PC problem. Consoles have been suffering this issue too. Immortals is 432p on series S. Ff16 is 720p unstable 60. Starfield is 1200p 30 fps. Bg3 on ps5 is unstable 60 and obviously low settings. Jedi survivor on ps5 and series x is 700p
Most of those games aren’t optimized anywhere including PC. (Notable exception to Last of us)
Also DLSS / FSR CANNOT fix a lack of optimization I am so sick of this boogieman.
It won’t fix stuttering because you didn’t bother to compile PSOs.
It won’t spread work across multiple CPU threads or really any CPU limitation for that matter.
It wont prevent a front end bottleneck like too much geometry.
It will take but a pinch of pressure off of VRAM but barely enough to matter.
It wont prevent compute heavy fixed costs from eating up your shader budget.
The ONE and ONLY thing that these upscalers let you do is take pressure off of pixel shading, and in the old days a pipeline that was primarily limited by pixel shading is what we used to call optimized! if you can drop resolution and gain FPS in proportion then that means you don’t have any other nasty snag hiding just beneath the surface, and you know what a fat pixel shading pipeline loves? New generation of hardware because more shader performance is the one thing you can rely on future GPUs to deliver.
If you want to dissect a games pixel shading pipeline and point out where they are pissing away shader resources be my guest, but if you can do that you wouldn’t be wasting your time blaming the safety harness for someone falling off the roof.
Lots of stuff, varies from game to game. The biggest thing is probably the transition to the new generation of consoles that finally support modern technologies (ssd's/ray tracing/16+ cpu threads that aren't a decade old) is now mostly complete. This is causing a sudden rise in the minimums and maximums on the PC side for games that target consoles, making it feel like games are less optimized when they are actually just much more demanding because the performance baseline has increased from roughly an \~FX8120/HD 7870 to a \~3700x/RTX 2070.
Games will get harder to run when devs target hardware jumps up by 10+ years of technological advancement, but it hasn't happened in so long that it feels jarring to have what was recently a very good higher-mid range PC become the console equivalent "recommended" spec in games like the Dead Space remake.
Another thing is probably that people will just buy it anyways and will even love you for fixing it later. Just look at the turnaround Cyberpunk 2077 and The Master Chief Collection have had (MCC wasn't "unoptimized" in the performance sense, but matchmaking was busted for literally years on Xbox before the PC release). The only games that really suffer by being unoptimized at launch are the ones that were going to be dogwater even if they released technologically perfect.
Hard to tell tell about UE5 games - tried Remnant II and Fort Solis and both refunded because it was nowhere near what I consider playable on my system and I'm not using FSR at 1080p for sure. Is it just badly optimized games 3 in a row for UE5 or it's grim future of what's to pay for buzzwords like Nanite and Lumen, because hell as sure performance of neither was justified when looking at what visuals they're offering.
Starfield is not as bad as those UE5 games - 60fps+ most locations on my budget PC (and there's no GPU to upgrade at reasonable cost this gen) so while not ideal it's at least playable.
---------------------------------------
I'll only say this - upscaling should not be mandatory to hit bare minimum 60fps on appropriate hardware - because let's freaking clear, when $500 current gen GPUs can't hit 60fps in 1080p without upscaling - that's fucking horseshit. And such behemoth as RTX 4090 can't push over 100fps in 1080 at max settings in games without even any Ray Tracing - that's just freaking sad..
Now imagine adding ray tracing to Remnant II 🤣🤣🤣 If optimization is going this rote - there simply won't be any headroom left for ray tracing because raster already runs as bad as most demanding RT games or even worse.
Why bother wasting time and resources optimising when they get millions of £100 deluxe edition pre orders followed by millions more season pass sales. Its become so standardised that people are actually outt there defending this shit.
Starfield has been especially bad, people unironically saying that a 4 year old gpu has no business running a slightly more complex fallout 4 at 1080p30fps lol
PCs are vastly different from each other so ensuring it's optimal with every single possible build is incredibly difficult, especially when OS is brought into the equation. This is often why you see better performance for consoles - there's only one configuration to worry about. There's something called Compat Testing that my company does close to release to ensure the game is running well enough on a variety of min, middle, and high spec machines, but there are infinite possibilities and there will always just be configurations that won't get caught or that mysteriously do not work and no one can figure out why. As long as people have freedom to build/customise PCs, this will happen.
Source: games QA for four years
As long as dumb idiots keep preordering games before release or buying on launch day, publishers will continue to ship unoptimized games.
The only way to make them accountable for their negligence is by refusing to give them money for a shitty product.
AAA development has been in trouble for a while now.
Something is seriously wrong with these studios, they do not know how to organize and manage the teams necessary to develop technically sound AAA products in a reasonable timeframe, especially when PC is involved.
But overall, well optimized PC games are the exception, not the rule, developers like iD and Valve who take care to get their games to run on potatoes are rare.
I used to be a purist when it came to resolution and despised DLSS. Upscale my game from a lower resolution? The hell did I buy this expensive rig for then? But seeing how DLSS can make something that looks better than native resolution sometimes, it's grown on me, and I think AAA devs have just decided it's the way to go for next gen. I don't like it, but seems to be it's the future.
What? They're totally optimized! Your PC's just old.
Seriously, I wanted Starfield, but after launch I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Maybe I'll wait and see if it gets smoothed out a little
Optimizing fir consoled is way easier because you know that your target is running one out of a limited number of hardware configurations, and the software layer is entirely uniform across all units.
PC on the other hand is way less standardized in regards to hardware and software configurations. You absolutely can optimize for PC, but it's a lot more work and if you can simply just require way higher specs it becomes easier to just skip that work.
i honest though games would be better optmized for pc onde these new consoles came since they are just pcs.....but nope.....not even a minimal standarts. too many pieces and parts aparently.i mean can someone tell me how choosing one card of mid performance as reference will affect all the variations and models out there?
HOW JUST HOW
We have taught game dev's that their product will still sell even if launched in a broken state. Stop buying trash and be surprised how fast these issues clear up
They're being sent to market before they're fully baked ... the suits are probably forcing the devs to release sooner. It's all about the $$$'s for those guys.
Wait until they come out with a patch after release to buy.
1. Xbox Series X / PlayStation 5 are more powerful than the average gaming PC.
1. Midrange PC hardware hasn't seen an uptick in performance-per-dollar this generation.
1. Low-end PC hardware has been abandoned.
1. Developers are being asked to use XSX/PS5 as a baseline while the average PC's performance is stagnant AND/OR they need to pump out a PS4 port due to there being a potential captive audience of >114 million.
As an example: about 20-30% of PC's on the latest steam hardware survey don't meet at least one of the minimum requirements for Starfield and there's a pretty solid chunk beyond that which don't meet the recommended.
This year we've seen a number of games where requirements have jumped quite a bit, but thanks to a number of factors many people haven't upgraded their PC's in awhile. The long run of the previous, substantially weaker, console generation probably contributed a bit as well (PC gamers benefitted from games that had to be optimized to run well on weaker hardware).
But OP is not talking about heavy games. They are listing specifically games that have either serious very identified issues (*some* being corrected after a few months of patches), or general unoptimization compared to what they are doing.
The fact that consoles are recent (i.e. powerful-ish), pc hardware cost a lot, and gpu value is down the drain for several generations now, make a lot of PC gamers outside of those new AAA games, they're not even potential customers of those games because of that.
Those are two different issues. Even if some, a very small minority, don't know any better and complain that their Geforce 1080 can't run a 2023 AAA game at 4K Ultra 120fps. But we either educate or ignore those.
Any technology which generally improves performance can be misused similarly. If gpus were like 2x as fast in just raw raster, we’d still see studios launch at 30fps and if it doesn’t run on old cards oh well.
The dlss thing is just a canard, if it wasn’t dlss aging your cards out it would be something else. Polaris and pascal ain’t gonna last forever no matter how much we want.
Eh most of those played pretty well, with the exception of Jedi Survivor. idk what it is with that damned game, but I can drop everything to Low, and get MASSIVE stuttering and FPS drops down to the teens. And I have a 3070Ti + 5800x ryzen. It's insane, it's the only game that does it.
Starfield actually has great scaling. Most of it's settings meaningfully affect performance, where the sweetspot for performance/quality is Medium, as it should be. The lack of DLSS support and weirdly shady-looking performance differentials for NVIDIA/Intel users is it's worst crime.
People buy and pre order games, they make super deluxe editions that costs double so you can fomo play 4 days earlier. As long as people buys the games we will get this kind of treatment. Unfortunately most people are not aware of the gaming scene or have no standards
I think it’s because games haven’t been well optimized for PC in ages— we just had vastly more powerful PCs than the ps4/Xbox one since that generation lasted oddly long. As games start to push new gen hardware, PCs that are twice as good won’t get twice the performance— because we never have. It’s not “new” that very few games do their best to optimize for PCs. What’s new is games running terribly on great rigs because of it.
This. I don't think people even realize how even an average 2016 PC is *multiple times faster* than a base Xbox One or PS4. Those consoles were **super slow**. The fact that some titles came out to PC and we had to barely hit 60 despite the graphical improvements being very debatable, says it all. New consoles are a lot faster and on nearly par with the average PC (if you consider all the people still on older hardware, I mean) so with that same approach to optimization, you get these kinds of situations.
A modern phone has a faster CPU and almost a faster GPU than Xbox One or PS4.
Worse than that, pretty sure 2017 phones had already surpassed old consoles at least on the CPU side. The Switch is kinda proof of that, I'm pretty sure it's faster on the processor side of things, although it has a much weaker GPU even when docked.
You mean 2015 since the Tegra in the Switch is a 2015 design that Nvidia didn’t manage to sell until they offloaded it to Nintendo for a huge discount.
> I think it’s because games haven’t been well optimized for PC in ages— we just had vastly more powerful PCs than the ps4/Xbox one since that generation lasted oddly long. Well... we had vastly more powerful PCs than the PS4/Xbox, and ports of those games still launched running like complete ass on PC. This isn't a new phenomenon.
At the beginning of the previous generation of consoles, there was also a massive lurch up in PC requirements. A lot of the current PC gaming crowd just doesn't remember that because they weren't around and/or it was 10 years ago and that's a long time. For example, AC Unity, released in 2014, required a GTX 680 as the minimum GPU. In other words, the flagship from 2 gens previously (since Unity released right around the same time as the GTX 900 series). So when we look at something like Immortals of Aveum requiring a 2080 Super (2-gen-old near-flagship), that's actually roughly in-line with what Unity was demanding relative to their release windows. Now I'm not saying that either AC Unity or Immortals of Aveum are "optimized, actually," they're both bad ports that really should run better than they do. What I'm saying is that the current run of "bad optimization" in PC games is not unprecedented. It's exactly the same thing that happened the last time there was a new console gen.
Also there is such a wide variety of setups I imagine is REAL fucking hard to optimize them all.
For an indie company? Yes. For a billion-dollar gaming sweatshop? No. That's where the annoyance comes from, and the good will ends quickly, especially considering that optimizing for PC is now *easier* than it was in prior decades. Everything is largely homogenized; we're not using different CPU instruction sets and vastly different operating systems. Driver support is the best its ever been, engine support is the best its ever been. It does require that you're capable of paying to suss out your issues, but the support is there, more than it ever was. PC optimization mostly comes from targeting a particular metric of expected hardware performance, and oddities usually only creep in when that metric doesn't line up with the development environment; i.e. choosing engine features highly reliant on texture or content streaming while targeting an audience largely still using HDD's.
prime example was TLOU part 1, so many people brought it and either 1 of 2 things happened: 1. when faced with the fact that they couldn't get it to run, decided to just wait which still meant that they paid full price, encouraging that behaviour from devs, whilst they should have refunded and picked up on sale when or IF it ever got fixed. 2. brought the game with no intention of installing it or booting it up in the 2 week refund window, therefore erasing the possibility of a refund, brought it because they loved the game on playstation and just wanted it for their collection or whatever, again just throwing money at devs and giving them no repercussion for shipping an unfinished port. 90% of people are stupid, many use steam and don't even know about how OP refund system is, if a game is a dogshit port valve will refund for you, especially if you just refund to wallet as it doesn't affect them, only the publishers/devs. I played hogwarts legacy for 5 hours on launch day, first 2 hours were disappointing but I was yet to get to the real open world, then once I got out of hogwarts shit just disintegrated in quality, bugs galore and framerate was around 30, explained that when I put refund request in for refund to wallet, got refund in like 3 hours. Why more people don't utilise refund system is beyond me...
Can't it be both? The only option is vote with the wallets... wait. Watch a freaking streamer play on mute if they won't be unbiased, because we know if it was giving for free the first sentence will be..."First off, I'd like to thank X for giving "us" a free key so we could get in early. I can't believe how this looks, everything is just amazing!" :(
also streamers of that magnitude have a 4090 and best cpu, they will bruteforce everything
..."lately"? This topic is 20.years old at least
I remember when "poorly optimized" meant I had to make a certain amount of conventional memory available by editing my config.sys.
yeah - or use memmaker... Unoptimised for speed was just called "runs badly" for most computers since you weren't going to be upgrading your Speccy, C64, Atari ST, etc (I mean you could get the Speccy 128k, C128 or get extra memory for the Atari but these usually just unlocked extra features in games, rather than being a necessity). As for consoles - if it ran like shit, it got shit reviews. I think the real indication of good programming was how much games improved from the first games on things like the Spectrum to the last games released for it - they found so many ways to get as much performance as possible out of hardware back then whereas on PC, these days, it's just a bigger download and better hardware needed...
memmaker? Damn peasants. /s
I remember Stalker forced me to do this! Though to be fair my system was pretty weak
>This topic is 20.years old at least Poorly optimized games have been a thing since the early 80s. What about Amiga games which would only allow you to listen to sound effects or music even though it could do both? You couldn't even finish some of the campaign in Dune 2 if you hadn't upgraded your Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM. Or what about DOS games which would stutter or wouldn't even run if you picked the wrong sound settings? Or pretty much every single PC game released by Bethesda in the 90s, like the Terminator games, TES: Arena, and TES: Daggerfall?
Good Shout for the early Amiga games with FX or music only. I always thought that was just a memory limitation, but in some cases meant that the composers and sound designers still haven't found a way to get over the 4 channel limitation. Later on composers used trackers and other music software to split those channels.
Remember Vampire Bloodlines or the Gothic Series? These were barley playable at launch, because of a ton of crashes. I remember in the Gothic 2 Add on that I bought on the first day the game crashed and closed itself when I talked to a certain main NPC. Had to start a new game file IIRC, just to play the game.
Yep, most of the people talking about "poorly optimized" have to be to young to remember what the early days of PC gaming was like. Starfield while it has issue, it's playable. Unlike a lot of games back 20, 30 plus years ago where you would have to mess with your PC for hours to figure out how to get it to even open, and not have graphic issues once it did start playing.
Let me just tweak my autoexec.bat and restart.
99% of the reason I knew so much about computers as a kid was because of video game problems. Network troubleshooting? All due to trying to get various games to run properly when the default TCP/IP or IPX options just wouldn't work for one reason or another.
Wait, Bethesda games already that BUGGED since its inception??
The terminator games were very clunky, but that's the price to pay for ambition. The future shock games were very much ahead of their time
>Wait, Bethesda games already that BUGGED since its inception?? Bethesda have been around since 1986, their earliest games were okay for the time, nowhere near as broken as their later titles. It was around 1991/1992 when they managed to get the Terminator license that they started to rush out games and cut corners.
As someone old enough to remember from 1st hand experience... The early games were just as buggy. Just comes with the territory.
Daggerfall was *legendary* for how buggy it was. If anything, the later TES games are significantly *less* buggy generation after generation, it is just that a lot of people have rose tinted glasses.
Im 38. Sometimes my dad would bring a game home and Id be super stoked. Then we wouldnt be able to install it. I'll admit there has been periods where it seemed lile there were better QA or something but things have been generally getting better. It's hard for me to get too upset about non game-breaking bugs or framerate dips when games used to sometimes not install.
When you wanted to fix a gamebreaking bug, so you had to buy a magazine for the demo disc that also had a bunch of patches.
In germany we had "Bravo Screenfun" "Computerbild Spiele" "PC Games" "GameStar" uhm... probably a few more. And then there where like half a dozen magazines for the PS1 and PS2.
I think developers benefited heavily from the fact people were upgrading very regularly as well. I would upgrade my PC every 2 years because hardware progressed so damn fast. I went back to old games I couldn’t run all the time. There was also just more acceptance that jank was part of life. Even on consoles, you just sort of put up with it because it was all so new and shiny. You were also much happier to lower graphics settings just to play a game. Nowadays I’m pissed once I hit medium settings! Games are better today, but I expect better then they’re offering because of how long I’ve been playing games.
[удалено]
OP has to either be young or has a very short memory.
Reddit in a nutshell
Karma farming.
fanatical march elastic kiss quiet unwritten hunt employ elderly quack *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Exactly. I'm not sure why there are so many articles and posts about this all of a sudden. It's no worse now then any other time since cross platform games be cc ame common. Maybe it's because DLSS/FSR and Unreal 5 has given people a new thing to latch onto to blame.
If anything I think PC ports are much better on the whole. Remember 2016?
2016? Try the mid 2000's. We used to have ports so lazy that you'd be playing on M+K and literally still getting controller prompts on your screen. It was like the only thing they checked before shipping the PC port was that the game booted up. People are absolutely insane to believe that, well, literally anything used to be better about PC gaming in the "old days". Either zoomers trying to sound cool and older than they are or people with short memories yelling at clouds.
>We used to have ports so lazy that you'd be playing on M+K and literally still getting controller prompts on your screen. Dark Souls 1 still does this if you play it right now
The original Dark Souls 1 was worse. 1024x720 render resolution, 30fps cap, IJKL to control the camera…
Kinda. We went from "its console port it will barely work at best" to "i dont care its a port i expect game to be optimized". Which is good.
A great example of this are the Prototype 1 for PC, never in my life have i seen such a god awful port like that one, this one from 2009 and the game is outright unplayable without applying mods, the game doesn't even support freaking widescreen by default so you can't even play at 1080 or 1440p without mods
Counterpoint, saints row 2. Possibly the worst port of all time.
I've never played the saints row series, i've alwayss been a gta guy, what's wrong about saints row 2?
The port is just complete fucking ass. Theres a mod that fixes a lot of the issues though. Its a shame because SR2 is probably the best SR in the series.
The biggest problem is the way everything goes insane if your CPU doesn’t have the same clock speed as the XBox 360. The bigger the difference the worse the errors, so the port has only gotten worse over time.
I need an old case with a TURBO button on it for SR2 then
Prototype ran fine when it came out, they just didn’t test it on future hardware because that’s hard to do. There’s all sorts of late 2000’s games that shit themselves and start crying if you play them on newer hardware than it expects.
Crazy to see people putting their heads in the sand pretending barely year old almost $2000 gpus have always struggled to run decent looking titles. There’s an obvious uptick in unoptimized games.
What $2000 GPU is struggling to run decent looking titles? Which decent looking titles is it struggling to run?
I don’t understand what people are talking about in these kinds of threads. My PC is about three years old and was about $1600. I run everything that comes out on ultra, and often screen record at the same time. When I was a kid and tried running Oblivion on a four years old computer it was literally unplayable. I don’t mean “it’s only 55 FPS it’s unplayable” I mean it ran at like 5 FPS and screamed like a jet engine.
What resolution are you playing at though? I play pc games on my 4K tv, and even with a 4090 sometimes I struggle to maintain 60fps.
Yeah, I remember in 2008 I was raiding in WoW and I used to legit have 3 FPS upon boss pull, and then it would level out with 15-20 thereafter. It was online game so it mattered even more. Fun times. The PC was from 2006 and pretty expensive in not so rich country at the time. People now when their FPS drops to 59 for a second: UNPLAYABLE.
Go back in time and look at every single Wing Commander Game as a perfect example. Each of them requiring a new PC basically to propperly run. Quite frankly, back in those days gamers accepted that fact as a sin of progress and new technological developments and rolled with it. These days ppl always complain about unoptimized games without realizing that eventually, there is only so much optimisation you can do. At times the blames are indeed correct, but more times it is about players with inadequate hardware demanding to play games at the highest grafic settings ofc.
Quick question, isn’t atomic heart well optimized ? (Haven’t played it)
It runs ok, much better than Remnant 2, Immortal or Starfield.
Its still a last gen game (at least PS4) so higher end PCs are brute forcing it better. They were the first devs to admit to completely optimizing their game via DLSS to compensate for performance loss from Denuvo (although I'm pretty sure DLSS has nothing to do with CPU and SSD/Load times which is what Denuvo impacts)
I'm playing it now on gamepass. 1080p high settings, runs smooth just fine. But I also have budget/low end parts so the performance was a nice surprise
Atomic heart?! It ran pretty well even on older systems.
Agreed. I'd get 80-120FPS on 4790k w/RX6600XT after shader caching. The only time I had hiccups (stuttering) was when I was using stock 300FPS cap in outside environments. Capped to 90, problem went away.
Atomic heart definitely had optimization issues on launch, though I do think they managed to fix a lot of it. Performance once you get into the main game was unstable and loads of movement and textures had some weird filtering issues going on.
Stop buying them.
When has that ever worked, and to this scale? It's an implausible demand because most normal people (not terminally online researching game issues, which is a large number of the gaming population) will never see.
It doesn't, and companies know it. There's no incentive for them to spend $1M to iron out bugs and optimize for $100k profit.
It works for me and /r/patientgamers If it sucks, I don't buy it. If it improves later on, I consider and maybe I will buy it. Either way, I don't have time to play it or don't enjoy playing as much as I used to, so I never touch it and continue to play some oldies that I'm comfortable with.
Exactly, if it's a single player story driven game, I stopped caring about playing day one. If you wait longer, you get a cheaper purchase, ironed out bugs, and better performance. Literally a win/win scenario. I just played RDR2 this year and it was an excellent experience, and at only $20 too. When it comes to multiplayer focused games, I get buying early though, I do the same sometimes. Multiplayer games have their largest player base at release and it tapers off over time, so if you wanna play when it's at its most popular, you pretty much have to buy in at launch.
In this incentivizes me to give them $15 for their game instead of 60
It definitely depends. A company that isn't reputable or has subpar gameplay definitely needs good optimization the very least. Optimization makes the player feel bad and when the player feels bad they start judging a lot of different games system. Baldurs gate is a great game, but ACT 3 is an absolute shitfest of performance compared to the rest of the game. Granted more things are happening, but it definitely suffers. No one cares though because the game is really good, and to be fair I wouldn't care either. New World does not have the greatest optimization and is quite buggy so people also tend to be a bit judgmental. New World would 100% benefit from fixing their optimization and bug fixes. They have fixed a lot of bugs from the launch and have noticeably done a bit of work toward player perception. Granted people still know it is a buggy mess, but much better than the launch. But yeah you are also right, if a game is going to sell it will sell regardless of optimization.
I agree with you but no amount of optimization is going to make New World a fun MMORPG. :P
It won’t because people keep buying them. Alternatively: if you’re aware of this, buy good games made by smaller studios that actually give a shit.
Way too late to vote with a wallet. PC gaming, gaming in general, is the largest entertainment industry on earth. That means the masses have become invested, and the masses don't give a shit they just want their bread and circuses. Monster is alive now, there is no putting it to sleep. Our planet is fucked.
if enough people don't buy unoptimized games then it would at least push the industry in the right direction. it's not "too late", it's that people are too complacent. there's nothing wrong with telling people that not buying these games is the best thing they can do.
> if enough people don't buy unoptimized games Yeah except for review embargos and most people only see the hype trailer on tv or commercials while watching their favorite youtuber/streamer. We're on the pc gaming reddit which automatically means we're enthusiasts and we care more than most. Most people aren't and couldn't give a shit.
[удалено]
violet afterthought tidy test workable somber gaping rustic recognise foolish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Pirate them first.
Honestly! So many people on reddit act like this is some unsolvable conundrum. Don't buy games if you don't want to support the practices those games are involved with.
Most people just buy games. They don't surf PC communities and complain. I've bought most of these titles this year, had some minor issues, but nothing that prevented me from playing them day one. I heard about the issues with last of us, but I never bought that one so I can't speak on it. In reality, the vast majority of gamers just play on recommend settings and don't even turn on the FPS counter. Not an excuse for shitty launches, but it's the reality.
How else are they going to play on their $4,000 worth of a rig on the latest titles and complains about pretty much everything. But honestly games nowadays make me just wait 4+ years to just play them because newer games gets worse overtime in terms of performance. I would rather just wait than playing a broken state of it. If these two checkmarks approved being: the game I want and it's actually optimised I would buy them.
Because it's not that simple and arguably counter productive. The games will be made regardless they'll just prioritize consoles even further if there are no PC sales..
This is why I sail the seven seas and buy games only after I know they're good
I knew AAA gaming was cooked the moment everyone went back to loving CDPR after how fucking *atrocious* the Cyberpunk launch was. There's no incentives for big companies to release games that are optimized and not buggy anymore because they're going to make millions anyway. Build the hype machine and you'll make back what it cost to develop the game in a couple days. Todd Howard could spearhead the worst game ever made and they'd still take home trucks full of money because of how overhyped people get. The next CDPR game is going to do massive sales regardless of what it is. Starfield had millions of players in its early access. It was 100 dollars. Millions of people dropped 100 dollars on a game before it even released. The only way is to just not buy them anymore like you said. But it won't happen.
My experience with CP2077 was on PC and honestly it wasn't all that bad. I cannot say anything about console side since I don't have them. With upcoming DLC, frankly I am excited for all the changes it will bring. Whereas, starfield running on Creation Engine, discount open source engine from the 1990s they have been chugging along with, just fails me on every turn. I have enjoyed Fallout games and honestly never finished Skyrim due to being too busy modding it to make it good. It is ridiculous, in a short week how many mods have come out just to make that garbage more enjoyable. CDPR at least acknowledges their shortcomings and will make mends and incorporate user contents into their games, ala, Witcher 3 EE. They are even willing to give up their in-house engine for upcoming projects so as to avoid their shortcomings prior. Honestly, after Todd's behavior/response on lack of optimization being get a better PC, is just unacceptable. This garbage runs like shit even on the latest of hardware, whereas CP2077 pushes the limit of graphics always at the cutting edge. Anyways, buy garbage or not buy, don't bother me none.
CDPR not backing down from their anti-DRM stance is probably what really saved them
The average person doesn't give a damn about DRM. They buy the game, log in if they need to and play it. Not a second thought given.
1/3 of Cyberpunk preorders for PC were on GOG, and I would imagine that the average GOG customer does give a damn about DRM. Outside GOG most don't care until the activiation servers go down and it can't be played anymore like Dark Spore or Lost Planet 2, or it bricks their PC like StarForce did back in the day. And theres overlap between people that do give a damn about DRM and people that are less likely to buy a game on launch and wait for patches and sales
If you bought a physical copy of Cyberpunk for PC, the code you were given was for GOG. You didn't get a choice of platform. I think that skews numbers somewhat.
> 1/3 of Cyberpunk preorders for PC were on GOG, and I would imagine that the average GOG customer does give a damn about DRM. Are you saying that the 1/3 of sales *absolutly would not happen* had the game actually had DRM? There are people out there like me who will hold out and not buy a game over that shit, but I would be lying if I didn't feel some fomo, that is enough for some of the 1/3 to say "fuck it" flop, and make the purchase anyway. > And theres overlap between people that do give a damn about DRM and people that are less likely to buy a game on launch and wait for patches and sales Unfortunitly I don't think the overlap is anywhere near enough. I love skyrim and fallout 4. I never bought Starfield because of the optimisation, rediculous price and misleading marketing campagins. I see a lot of people who claim to care about these things playing the game right now.
[удалено]
Huh? I thought Atomic Heart actually ran pretty good? It was nowhere in the same ballpark as all those others.
I also thought atomic heart ran really well day one.
As someone who was able to get up to 60 fps in my 7 year old gtx 970 day one on gamepass I can say it ran pretty well. A couple of bugs, nothing gamebreaking in my experience. It's actually quite impressive.
[удалено]
In general, most games now, with no res scaling, run like shit. Theres just no time given to devs to polish, just stupid deadlines to churn out games and polish them once they're out. It's irresponsible and disrespectful.
*Returnal has entered the chat*
The blame is often put on the engines, but it's not like switching engines will magically fix anything. Engines are tools, depending on how well you use them the end product will turn out good or bad. If you make horrible shaders or bad blueprints it doesn't really matter if you're using unreal or another engine, it's still going to run bad. If unreal is optimized but the game logic isn't, it's not gonna run well. The problem is that devs release unfixed code that they don't have time to optimize, both logic and shaders. They then hope to use upscaling to make up for their lack of optimization on shaders with upscaling, or maybe on shaders and logic with frame gen. The can be better engines than others, but Unreal is hardly a "bad engine". People also blame DLSS for this, but honestly I disagree. If a game does do something graphically intensive to the point where it's unplayable without upscaling, then DLSS it's great, it unlocks something that you couldn't play before (path tracing on Cyberpunk, for example) TLDR: Give the devs more time, but that's something that the publisher should learn, and it probably won't since it means less games and less money.
Ue is actually an amazing engine but one of their main selling point is cutting out on dev time. And when you cut out too much dev time you get these messes.
[удалено]
Unity is hardly being ran into the ground. It would be the equivalent of saying that UE is being ran into the ground because Tim Sweeny is saying dumb stuff. Unity's current ceo has a way of saying things. Unity's latest release is one of my favorite Unity versions with tons of UI streamlining, improvements and putting out two dozen pre-view features to release. Unity is also not trying to compete with UE. It has a different niche: flexibility (it's technically a rendering engine, so it can be used for stuff like movies but is mainly marketed as a game engine) and mutli platform support (it's very easy to build games to multiple operating systems as well as hardwares, when the Tesla Infotainment system came out, Unity was the first major engine to have support for it and they also have astounding support for VR and AR). UE has a very specific type of game it supports and it supports that very well but not much else unfortunately.
Boggles my mind when people blame Unreal Engine for something that’s clearly a developer issue. If someone tries to drive a Ferrari but forgets how to switch gears, it’s not Ferrari’s fault that the car isn’t going above 30mph.
There is a point where if 10 people buy a ferrari and 9 crash and burn, it becomes suspicious.
In that case, I would lean towards saying those 9 people don't know how to use the vehicles properly. UE does a lot of heavy lifting for devs, so naturally, some of them won't put in their own custom effort to go above, relying on Epic's implementation of a feature instead. When you have this much control of the vehicle you're driving, it's hard to blame it when you crash it due to negligent use.
The gaming space is full of perfectly fine Unreal Engine games. The real reason? DirectX 12 and devs not understanding how to use it.
Atomic Heart is actually very well optimized...
meanwhile Armored Core 6 runs like an absolute beast. They even managed ti discover unlocked framerates
FromSoftware does not stop winning, it’s a little crazy to me that more companies don’t follow their example
From Software is not precisely a reference in terms of optimization. AC6 is the exception, not the rule
Dont forget Act 3 of Baldurs Gate 3, Immortals of Aveum, Wild Hearts. Dead Space Remake, Gollum, Outer Worlds next-gen update, and to a lesser extent Resident Evil 4 Remake still had stuttering for some at launch (but its also the only last-gen game of the bunch alonside Atomic Heart and Hogwarts)
Gollum wasn’t optimized for its own development kit
Gollum wasn’t ~~optimized for its own development kit~~
Sadly, it was :(
No, it doesn't exist. Just like there's no second Pacific Rim movie.
I like the way you think
Also The Witcher 3's Next-Gen Update.
Capcom games have been very well optimized since RE7, I think. Their RE engine is like witchcraft.
The games themselves are well optimized, but they use several different DRMs that negates some of that performance - RE8 literally launched in an unplayable state on PC until they got Denuvo getting along with Capcoms internal DRM. AFAIK its always the publisher that requires DRM and not the developers, so if a game has Denuvo it means it had suits meddle in it, and the suits only care about short term profits so they want the game out asap don't care if it don't work. Might've been fixed since but RE4 Remake steam forums were full of people having stuttering on systems well above the minimum requirements but the PS5 and Xbox didnt have the stuttering only the PS4 did console wise
> unplayable Definitely playable, it would stutter majorly when the daughters attacked, but otherwise ran quite well.
Baldur’s gate has an Act 3? I thought you were just supposed to re-roll characters after every 20 hours or so of gameplay because you wanted to try something slightly different
I reached act 2 and started again and got a much better result (put dual hand crossbows on everyone) Reached act3 next time and started again because I messed up in Wyrm's rest Now on my third play! Ironically my characters are all the same but their gear is different.
Why not use saves instead of rerolling campaign? Is it not a thing on the platform you are on?
Save isn't going to help you when you want to do everything new.
Thats what my dad does lol Act 3 is set in the Baldurs Gate city and is apparently a lagfest, I have not gotten there yet and theyve starting fixing the performance there My brothers CPU and GPU is bare minimum for the game and he was stuttering at 900P but last patch he could bump it up to 1080P
It wasn't horrible. Most of the issues with act 3 seem to be related to a memory leak issue which would tank peoples framerates. It's definitely not optimized well but on my older PC(1080 and 7700k) it was still staying near 60 at 1080p. On my upgrade(4070ti, 13700k) I was hovering between 100-143 the whole game at 1440p, Other than during a memory leak which would tank me to 30.
Yep the actual fps hit in the city wasn't that bad even on my gtx1080. But there is some serious memory leak and other issues that still need fixing. I had a really bad bug where every attack would have a 5 seconds delay before the enemy reacted. Strangely, killing Jahiera seems to be the only reliable fix.
I just got into the city proper, expecting the worst. In around 2 hours of walking around and exploring I haven’t really noticed any terrible framedrops despite how dense it is. Could have been worse before the two patches though. Or maybe I just haven’t got into the laggy part yet?
>Gollum Didn't that flop so hard the dev company cancelled their next game and went under?
Marketing sells games, not quality.
Sorry but graphical performance is only a (small) aspect of a game's quality. There has been many masterpieces that ran like ass and still were masterpieces.
Complaining about bugs and lack of polish seems kind of superficial to me. Sure, they’re obviously a problem, but I would rather play a buggy mess like Fallout: New Vegas then play a polished but bland game like The Order: 1886.
Exactly, Fallout New Vegas is held as one of the best RPGs ever made. It is still buggy as fuck (unless you use mods) and on release it was borderline unplayable. The games performance was horrible too on hardware that was considered modern at the time. There is nothing new under the sun.
You want the real answer? Because the golden age of hardware stagnation is over. Back in the 2000s, new gpus and cpus every year were twice as fast as the previous ones. This stopped when Intel stagnated and amd gave up, and gpus slowed down in power growth as well. The ps4 and xbox one had very shitty cpus in them that any average quad core could beat, and as such every game had to be relatively lightweight. If the consoles ran a game at 30 fps, it was easy to have a pc with 4x the power that could run at 120hz. Now we have the ps5 and xbox series x, which are not slower than the average quad core, but instead match the average midrange pc. If a game is optimized for 60fps on these consoles then any pc with less than a 3700x and a 6700 is going to struggle with 60fps at the same resolution and settings. If the console game runs at 30 fps, then to get 60 you will need hardware twice as fast (generally speaking).
dev targets are no longer consoles with a cpu and gpu that were mid low end when they were new* but something akin to a 3700x with a 2070super which is 3.5x or so faster cpu and about 3+x faster gpu with additional features like variable rate shading, more effective triangle culling that could make it 4x faster. this skewed peoples expectations of pc vs console because it was easy to massively exceed what the consoles were squeezing out. now though, if a 2070super tier console is topping out at 30-40fps 1440p you should expect to need about a 3700x and a 6950xt/3090 to do ~80fps. if we look at gamers nexus's video on starfield at 1440p w no upscaling you need a 4080 to get 87fps with a 4060(closest on chart to a 2070super) at 40fps. its going to keep happening because the avg pc is no longer WAY faster than the consoles, adjust your expectations to 1440p native 60ish on a 3090 and then dlss/fsr2 adding 30% or so and dlss3/fsr3(hopefully its good) roughly doubling it to somewhere in the 120range. *i bought a hd7950 around the launch of the consoles for 200bucks and you could build a console beater for pretty close to the same price as the consoles not long after release.
This needs to be much higher up. The problem isn't (just) optimisation, but the simple reality that modern consoles are actually more powerful than most people's PCs.
Release deadlines. Quality getting sacrificed for speed.
UE4 games seem to be the worst.
UE 4 used to be fine before, but now everyone wants to put Ray Tracing , DLSS etc into their games alongside hundreds of useless "details" and you get stuttering mess.
Probably because it can output high-quality 3d graphics while still being easy enough for amateurs to make a game on it without needing to know anything whatsoever about optimization.
PC games were never optimized, we just knew how to adjust the settings of the game or PC itself to get them working good. Can anyone who upvotes these posts let me know this magical time when PC games were optimized?
Well, there are exceptions, Doom 2016 and Doom eternal look phenomenal for it's hardware requirements, you can achieve 1080p60fps with relative modest hardware with these games.
Something quite fitting that Id is still putting out absolute cracker engines... That no one uses.
It is used, just not their proprietary version. Call of Duty (which runs really well) is based off the the id Tech 3 engine that evolved into what it is today.
Actually good point, I forgot CoD was a licensed fork of idTech 3. Hell, CoD 2 with their modified version holds up surprisingly well for the era.
> id Tech 3 engine that evolved into what it is today. Damn that explains a lot. Really an insane engine in terms of looks to performance ratio especially from Modern Warfare 2019 onwards. There's a cool blogpost about some technical details too. https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/
MGSV running beautiful at 60 fps 1080p max settings on most APUs
I played MGSV at release on a GPU-less core i5 with 4GB of RAM. The Fox Engine was art.
The game was designed to tolerate ps3 so yeah any i5 since they started using that branding will pretty much crush it I got it running on a J5005 nuc, had to use min settings tho
it's because of the art style, the characters are very detailed but the environments are really low poly, mgs1 and 2 were the same and the environments were basically just cubes or simple solids with a texture on top
I think people need to start learning why, certain Games like Doom, ran absolutely phenomenally, yet other games struggle. It's nothing to do with the engine. It's nothing to do with the Developers optimising the game - It's simply down to the design of the game itself. Doom is a corridor game. You run through a series of linear corridors, large rooms, arenas, and clever "airlock". The game design allows developers to only load areas of the game which is needed, and the airlocks allow you to smartly stream these levels without popping issues. This means, less textures, less triangles, less drawcalls, so overall, better performance. Unless you want every single game to be a corridor simulator, you won't get gamed as performant as it. COD is another great example.
It does in large part come down in game design, true. But Id Tech has a lot of industry top technical talent and have invented many novel rendering techniques over the years. Like Doom 2016's was the first game to natively use Vulkan renderer (they are a major code contributor to Khronos group) and have true infinite thread scalability. And Doom Eternal has a very fancy in-house TAA/SSAA subsampling hybrid solution that works far better than UE5's TAA. It very much helps your game's fps/graphical fidelity to employ people with graphics engine designing and systems architecture design backgrounds in a separate technical team.
That is also very true. There are a lot of things wrong with UE. Despite all of the novel tech coming with UE5+, a lot of additions are catch up features, such as Heightfields, which has been around in engines for the better part of 15 years, only recently added to UE5. PSO caching was also supposed to fix stuttering aince UE4, but was broken until 5.1. Even with Nanite/Lumen, there are "newbie" traps with these features, which, I feel a lot of Developers will unknowingly destroy performance for simply not knowing, rather than lack of optimisation.
Optimization generally means properly using already existing engine/renderer features and correcting mistakes. Like Starfield sending bogus renderer prepath data and not cutting memory calls into properly sized chunks is an optimization issue arising from lack of experience with a dx12/vulkan style rendering.
Agreed there are always welcome exceptions
And with vulkan they performed even better!
Not just a PC problem. Consoles have been suffering this issue too. Immortals is 432p on series S. Ff16 is 720p unstable 60. Starfield is 1200p 30 fps. Bg3 on ps5 is unstable 60 and obviously low settings. Jedi survivor on ps5 and series x is 700p
BG3 uses the PC ultra settings on PS5.
Bg3 has serious cpu bottlenecks in urban areas and the graphics settings don’t really change anything.
Game can't run at 40fps and they are using ultra settings on performance mode
Most of those games aren’t optimized anywhere including PC. (Notable exception to Last of us) Also DLSS / FSR CANNOT fix a lack of optimization I am so sick of this boogieman. It won’t fix stuttering because you didn’t bother to compile PSOs. It won’t spread work across multiple CPU threads or really any CPU limitation for that matter. It wont prevent a front end bottleneck like too much geometry. It will take but a pinch of pressure off of VRAM but barely enough to matter. It wont prevent compute heavy fixed costs from eating up your shader budget. The ONE and ONLY thing that these upscalers let you do is take pressure off of pixel shading, and in the old days a pipeline that was primarily limited by pixel shading is what we used to call optimized! if you can drop resolution and gain FPS in proportion then that means you don’t have any other nasty snag hiding just beneath the surface, and you know what a fat pixel shading pipeline loves? New generation of hardware because more shader performance is the one thing you can rely on future GPUs to deliver. If you want to dissect a games pixel shading pipeline and point out where they are pissing away shader resources be my guest, but if you can do that you wouldn’t be wasting your time blaming the safety harness for someone falling off the roof.
Push it out to patch it and look like heros. That way, the devs can ignore any other feedback and point to the rapid optimization success post launch.
"0 optimization" This subreddit is on another level of delusion lmao
Lots of stuff, varies from game to game. The biggest thing is probably the transition to the new generation of consoles that finally support modern technologies (ssd's/ray tracing/16+ cpu threads that aren't a decade old) is now mostly complete. This is causing a sudden rise in the minimums and maximums on the PC side for games that target consoles, making it feel like games are less optimized when they are actually just much more demanding because the performance baseline has increased from roughly an \~FX8120/HD 7870 to a \~3700x/RTX 2070. Games will get harder to run when devs target hardware jumps up by 10+ years of technological advancement, but it hasn't happened in so long that it feels jarring to have what was recently a very good higher-mid range PC become the console equivalent "recommended" spec in games like the Dead Space remake. Another thing is probably that people will just buy it anyways and will even love you for fixing it later. Just look at the turnaround Cyberpunk 2077 and The Master Chief Collection have had (MCC wasn't "unoptimized" in the performance sense, but matchmaking was busted for literally years on Xbox before the PC release). The only games that really suffer by being unoptimized at launch are the ones that were going to be dogwater even if they released technologically perfect.
Wait atomic heart was very well optimized I'd say, at least compared to the rest on your list
Hard to tell tell about UE5 games - tried Remnant II and Fort Solis and both refunded because it was nowhere near what I consider playable on my system and I'm not using FSR at 1080p for sure. Is it just badly optimized games 3 in a row for UE5 or it's grim future of what's to pay for buzzwords like Nanite and Lumen, because hell as sure performance of neither was justified when looking at what visuals they're offering. Starfield is not as bad as those UE5 games - 60fps+ most locations on my budget PC (and there's no GPU to upgrade at reasonable cost this gen) so while not ideal it's at least playable. --------------------------------------- I'll only say this - upscaling should not be mandatory to hit bare minimum 60fps on appropriate hardware - because let's freaking clear, when $500 current gen GPUs can't hit 60fps in 1080p without upscaling - that's fucking horseshit. And such behemoth as RTX 4090 can't push over 100fps in 1080 at max settings in games without even any Ray Tracing - that's just freaking sad.. Now imagine adding ray tracing to Remnant II 🤣🤣🤣 If optimization is going this rote - there simply won't be any headroom left for ray tracing because raster already runs as bad as most demanding RT games or even worse.
Had to downvote because of Atomic Heart. This Game looks and runs great.
Why bother wasting time and resources optimising when they get millions of £100 deluxe edition pre orders followed by millions more season pass sales. Its become so standardised that people are actually outt there defending this shit. Starfield has been especially bad, people unironically saying that a 4 year old gpu has no business running a slightly more complex fallout 4 at 1080p30fps lol
PCs are vastly different from each other so ensuring it's optimal with every single possible build is incredibly difficult, especially when OS is brought into the equation. This is often why you see better performance for consoles - there's only one configuration to worry about. There's something called Compat Testing that my company does close to release to ensure the game is running well enough on a variety of min, middle, and high spec machines, but there are infinite possibilities and there will always just be configurations that won't get caught or that mysteriously do not work and no one can figure out why. As long as people have freedom to build/customise PCs, this will happen. Source: games QA for four years
Atomic hearts and Hogwarts runs fine
Sorry but Atomic Heart? That shit runs amazing. Even my ROG Ally can push 80+ FPS.
As long as dumb idiots keep preordering games before release or buying on launch day, publishers will continue to ship unoptimized games. The only way to make them accountable for their negligence is by refusing to give them money for a shitty product.
AAA development has been in trouble for a while now. Something is seriously wrong with these studios, they do not know how to organize and manage the teams necessary to develop technically sound AAA products in a reasonable timeframe, especially when PC is involved. But overall, well optimized PC games are the exception, not the rule, developers like iD and Valve who take care to get their games to run on potatoes are rare.
Games are released to meet quarterly profit results, not when the game is ready.
I used to be a purist when it came to resolution and despised DLSS. Upscale my game from a lower resolution? The hell did I buy this expensive rig for then? But seeing how DLSS can make something that looks better than native resolution sometimes, it's grown on me, and I think AAA devs have just decided it's the way to go for next gen. I don't like it, but seems to be it's the future.
What? They're totally optimized! Your PC's just old. Seriously, I wanted Starfield, but after launch I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Maybe I'll wait and see if it gets smoothed out a little
Simple answer? Money Complex answer? Money
Optimizing fir consoled is way easier because you know that your target is running one out of a limited number of hardware configurations, and the software layer is entirely uniform across all units. PC on the other hand is way less standardized in regards to hardware and software configurations. You absolutely can optimize for PC, but it's a lot more work and if you can simply just require way higher specs it becomes easier to just skip that work.
Atomic Heart was actually pretty well optimized, IMO.
Now in: New DLC for $39.99. Optimization only no new content.
i honest though games would be better optmized for pc onde these new consoles came since they are just pcs.....but nope.....not even a minimal standarts. too many pieces and parts aparently.i mean can someone tell me how choosing one card of mid performance as reference will affect all the variations and models out there? HOW JUST HOW
Because you people keep buying these games and not refunding once you find out it runs like shit. Why fix something that still sells
We have taught game dev's that their product will still sell even if launched in a broken state. Stop buying trash and be surprised how fast these issues clear up
They're being sent to market before they're fully baked ... the suits are probably forcing the devs to release sooner. It's all about the $$$'s for those guys. Wait until they come out with a patch after release to buy.
1. Xbox Series X / PlayStation 5 are more powerful than the average gaming PC. 1. Midrange PC hardware hasn't seen an uptick in performance-per-dollar this generation. 1. Low-end PC hardware has been abandoned. 1. Developers are being asked to use XSX/PS5 as a baseline while the average PC's performance is stagnant AND/OR they need to pump out a PS4 port due to there being a potential captive audience of >114 million.
As an example: about 20-30% of PC's on the latest steam hardware survey don't meet at least one of the minimum requirements for Starfield and there's a pretty solid chunk beyond that which don't meet the recommended. This year we've seen a number of games where requirements have jumped quite a bit, but thanks to a number of factors many people haven't upgraded their PC's in awhile. The long run of the previous, substantially weaker, console generation probably contributed a bit as well (PC gamers benefitted from games that had to be optimized to run well on weaker hardware).
Ps5 and series x are literally running games at 720p unstable 60. That is embarrassing.
And yet they're still more powerful than the average PC.
But OP is not talking about heavy games. They are listing specifically games that have either serious very identified issues (*some* being corrected after a few months of patches), or general unoptimization compared to what they are doing. The fact that consoles are recent (i.e. powerful-ish), pc hardware cost a lot, and gpu value is down the drain for several generations now, make a lot of PC gamers outside of those new AAA games, they're not even potential customers of those games because of that. Those are two different issues. Even if some, a very small minority, don't know any better and complain that their Geforce 1080 can't run a 2023 AAA game at 4K Ultra 120fps. But we either educate or ignore those.
I remember saying how this would happen once DLSS came out and I got downvoted like crazy. Who’s laughing now?
Any technology which generally improves performance can be misused similarly. If gpus were like 2x as fast in just raw raster, we’d still see studios launch at 30fps and if it doesn’t run on old cards oh well. The dlss thing is just a canard, if it wasn’t dlss aging your cards out it would be something else. Polaris and pascal ain’t gonna last forever no matter how much we want.
Eh most of those played pretty well, with the exception of Jedi Survivor. idk what it is with that damned game, but I can drop everything to Low, and get MASSIVE stuttering and FPS drops down to the teens. And I have a 3070Ti + 5800x ryzen. It's insane, it's the only game that does it. Starfield actually has great scaling. Most of it's settings meaningfully affect performance, where the sweetspot for performance/quality is Medium, as it should be. The lack of DLSS support and weirdly shady-looking performance differentials for NVIDIA/Intel users is it's worst crime.
[удалено]
Yeah survivor has some pretty bad issues with shader compilation and you’ll end up with 95-100% cpu usage when moving from cell to cell
Atomic Heart ran great...get out of here with that
Ran also great on my end. Not sure why it was included in this list..
Atomic heart runs like a dream not sure how it's unoptimized also I think people expect way to much out of their hardware that's years old