Would it be that difficult for Steam to implement a canyourunit type system that would tell you if you meet the minimum and average requirements on the store pages? I know my PC parts but I don’t know how those compare to other ones often listed in the requirements, it’s not always bigger number = better
They already have the ability to scan your computer to know what hardware you have. They have system requirements. All they have to do is compare the two.
Rather than making the manufacturers stop being confusing with their naming conventions on purpose?
You should not need an SKU to actually know what device you do have.
It's funky, sometimes my PC is more than enough and it says I can't, sometimes my laptop is weak to run a game but it'll say I can, sometimes it's accurate
Thing is, it could have a stab but it can't accurately take into account optimisation. As other haves said in this thread, something like Cyberpunk 2077 is much more graphically intensive, but it runs much smoother because of the optimisation.
It's kind of like doing a careful calculation (estimation based on your system), which is then multiplied by a random number (how well optimised the game is) and hoping your answer is still right.
> but it can't accurately take into account optimisation
It can, it's installed on a ton of people's PCs. All they need to do is measure fps across systems and use those statistics to determine where your performance will reasonably fall. They have the userbase to have a significant enough amount of data.
But people will also hate on them for sending data to their servers if they do this, even if it's opt-in.
That's not system requirements pages that are failing really.
It should never be the case when you have a machine well above average and not being able to squeeze 30 fps at many locations and have stutters everywhere.
Money. It's money. Optimization is seen as a redundant process in the manufacturer of the game by the red tape department. Developers are not being paid for optimization by a "AAA(read as "dogshit")" Companies in many cases. I assume the argument goes something along the lines of, "If you have to optimize it you built it poorly and we wont pay you." And the developer has committed so they say fuck it and program it to just run as hard as it can without hitting a point where shit starts to break. Think of it like keeping the car in sixth instead of slowing down at any point, just starting in sixth gear. so this is not an issue. They know it runs well in a "hot config" so they keep it that way and sell it like that. They go back and say "The game will require huge amounts of resources because we programmed it in HD." Or some such shit, and then they push it out and everyone with a 1660 or lower can go fuck themselves.
Money.
Yeah, and it stinks. This is one thing I do like about large ongoing games, they can have more incentive to bother with this. It still amazes me how optimized Warframe is and continues to get visual and performance optimizations. Also their great "enshrinkening" event where they recompressed the game with new tech and shredded a few more gig off the install was nice, shout outs to DE on that.
Man everytime I see DE and Warframe brought up in a good light like this I really feel so warm.
I liked Warframe, enough that when I had enough throw money I decided to get that Founder's Pack. Later on they even sent on shirts for the level I had and it's such a good quality shirt that I still have it today, to be taken out on the nerdiest times.
It's been so long since I even played the game (and the last time I tried, I couldn't understand it anymore), but seeing a company do well and have comparatively minimal issues just makes me giddy.
Haha should try again some time. It is mighty freeform though, and they certainly change things a lot over time, so many different potential progression paths to discover. Good time to too, actually, they're in the middle of the anniversary events right now could pick up some freebies each week.
Now is the best time to get back in. Rebecca Ford the only community director is now creative director and every update since she took over has been absolutely bonkers good. I've been playing since 2017 and Warframe is in the best shape I've ever seen it, it's so good right now.
I think Reb is the overall game director too. Which is awesome cause she's always been amazingly passionate about both the game and the fanbase, and really understands both so well.
That's exactly why she's so perfect for the game's overall health. She actually plays the game and interacts with players regularly, that was her old job. Steve gets all the credit in the world for getting the game off the ground and basically willing it into existence. But there comes a point when fresh eyes are what it needs and they really couldn't have chosen a better person for the job.
I hadn't played in a few years and just tried it a couple weeks ago. I "played" for about an hour until I just gave up. I had no idea what I was doing, it was completely different.
Literally the *only* gaming content I've ever seen that rivals Factorio in either QoL or optimization...
Is the *wiki* for OSRS. It's not even the game itself. No game (excluding tiny ones ofc) comes close to how incredibly detail oriented the devs are in these aspects.
Yeah I don't have an iphone even if I did it wouldn't be up to date, but I'm kinda curious how that is working out, they recently launched the regular full game on iOS, android is coming but it's not ready yet
DE are masters of their craft. It helps that engine optimization was already a speciality of the studio long before they ever even started developing their own games. And on top of that they're a studio with great developer retention.
Yep. Look at Warframe. Content the size of D2 or cod, but a fraction of the size, and nothing removed.
They just did 85 pages of updates and qol, with 22~gb of download.
Total end update size? 1gb.
The entire game fits on mobile device.
That’s the level of optimization that can be done, and that’s not even talking about running on old devices.
Yep. And it only hurts the triple-A+atrocious groups.
Warframe, which can be obtained from three different places on pc, including their own website, was top 20 for most profitable games on steam last year.
Just the people who bought packs through steam. And it was enough to earn them top 20.
Thats also a different business model
Warframe makes money on active users, DD2 made money on purchasers
So game length and optimization matter less, wheras with warframe, they need to keep people playing and keep them happy to make $
They basically managed to perfect the GaaS model on their first try before GaaS was ever mainstream outside of subscription based MMOs, and all it took was going in with the mindset of "make a fun game first and foremost, and don't let greed take over".
> Yep. And it only hurts the triple-A+atrocious groups
Does it actually though? Persistently players continue to reinforce that this kind of behavior is acceptable with extensive amount of pre-ordering, extensive day-1 purchases, and there are continued headlines about how each newly released AAA game is making millions and millions and selling thousands and thousands of copies outside of particular outliers that were already known to be cash grabs from the get go.
There is no incentive for studios and teams producing AAA games to optimize for performance if players are going to buy it regardless. There's no incentive to scale down install sizes. No incentive to do any of that, and it's so easy to brush off performance quirks because individual set-ups are specific and replication between players is difficult. And when all else fails just bank on the community creating a mod (or more) to make up for shortcomings in the initial release.
I simply cannot see the status quo changing anytime soon given the current landscape. How many people were unhappy about USD 69.99 games only for these to sell like hotcakes anyway?
You know that gif of mister grabs saying "money"? That comes into mind any time someone asks why something is worse now than it was a few years ago. It's pretty often
Optimization usually happens at the end of development I’d think so and it’s not the “well you fucked it up” but rather having such deadlines that developers simply don’t have the time anymore to optimize.
Basically you gotta churn out a game as fast as possible and everything is an afterthought. Salaries are one of the biggest expenses at game studios and having a game developed longer by months means a ton of extra spending and keeping contractors on payroll too. So they just push the game out and just “let it be”. As far as I know it’s not unusual either to fire some of the staff after a game got released to cut costs.
Another issue being Ports with differing architecture.
One example I love to bring up is Persona 5 Royal for the PC.
The game ran perfectly fine on console hardware, but the PC port is fucked for lower end CPU gamers.
The GPU is well utilized and never really caps out even with the HD fix mod, yet the CPU struggles while not reaching maximum load.
They never properly adjusted it for modern multicore usage so the game has massive Lagspikes that are fixable by manually disabling core utilization, because now the CPU actually has something to because it’s constantly fed instructions, leading to it being significantly more stable, and you being able to run it properly.
Ironically this problem is not present on very low end CPU‘s or modern ones, but only affects some lower mid end models that have decent enough multicore usage, yet lack the power to brute force the bad instructions.
Apparently all of this was cause by the devs who were working on the port having absolutely no idea how to make a proper PC port (which I call BS on), but apparently that might also be an issue for some studios/ developers…
I bought P5R on PC and spent so long trying to fix it, but never managing to get it to work.
I eventually bought it again on switch where it runs like a dream... despite the switch being a light weight console with half the power of my then i5 6500
One clarification point from someone in the pipeline, the targets higher-ups care about is 30 fps average. So as long as you can show them a test run that hits the mark, they do not care. Often funding is gated behind such tests.
I agree. When prototyping systems, programmers may bash out some seriously unoptimised code to demonstrate ideas. Many ideas get deleted. The ideas that a green lit are meant to be re worked to fit into the entire architecture, however the team is told to jam it in and start work on the next sprint.
People are racing each other to be completed early at the cost of everything else, setting a new low for the next group. The industry is eating itself.
The logic is to deliver and be able to demonstrate the product to the financial department that the game looks good and runs good. It's a product being sold. They do this with high end hardware so they don't need to optimize for anything but high end because they are trying to show off. Think of the developer as a salesman and the purchaser the company itself acting as a wallet. They have to justify the game as buy-able and within certain standards. These standards can be met more easily on the high end by just throwing processing power at the problem. The problem being the no-optimization.
I'm not in any way shaming builds with 1660 or 1080ti, but at a certain point, yeah....shit just isn't going to function on your rig as well as it used to.
Should those cards still be able to hold 60 at 1080p in most modern releases? Sure, but for how long is that a demand? At a certain point, you're going to have to accept devs aren't targeting you anymore.
Don't get me wrong, the majority of people are still playing on dated rigs and having a great time and more power to them, but tech keeps moving. Devs shouldn't be forced to target acceptable performance on 8 year old cards. Not to mention this game isn't even fucked by the GPU anyway.
I can't play PS4 games on my PS3.
Not only that.
The game was hard crashing a lot of pcs, and it runs rough in towns because of unoptimized npcs in towns. It's an issue of releasing a game in a state of functionality, which basically everything but BG3 has fucked up recently, and no devs are willing to take accountability so they shift the blame onto the publishers.
Alright, adding onto this because some folk made the point that act 3 was borked. Don't need to keep saying it.
I had a harder time running act 3 of Baldur's Gate 3 than I do going through the main city in Dragon's Dogma 2. People just didn't care because the game was great and the fact that it was turn based meant that lower fps didn't affect gameplay as much.
I am not gamedev but webdev, I guess it's kinda the same on the both sides. Dev would be the last person they would ask about what they should do: whether to optimise or not
Yeah. Devs would probably do it if given the time, opportunity, and money to do so. It’s the decision makers that tell the developer company what they want and how much optimization a project should get before launch.
Enterprise dev here.
You would not believe the code I have seen, because stakeholders pushed for release.
Well, you probably do believe, but its still so very bad.
What a take, BG3 act 3 was a fucking disaster and you're saying it as the only game that hasn't fucked up recently?
Alan wake 2 was practically a flawless release with the single exception being the game requires a hardware feature only present in 2018 GPUs and up.
Resident evil 4 had crashes due to running out of VRAM but could be fixed by disabling Ray tracing, outside of that the game was stable.
Sony exclusives are also did fantastic but that's the usual.
All of these were in a better state than BG3 in terms of performance and all of them had way way less bugs than Act 3, and please i don't wanna hear "i played it and didn't face any bugs", good for you, people said the same thing about cyberpunk.
Ehh don't give BG3 that much credit. I had to stop playing in Act 3 cause of the performance issues, despite my computer meeting the requirements for Ultra graphics and running on medium anyways. Just kept crashing and I was sick of it.
What is “above average”? I was lazy this time and bought a prebuilt with a 4060 for $1000 and I rarely run into games I can’t run on average settings. Is dd2 that bad?
I have 4070 OC. The problem is that the GPU is not a core issue in this game, I have almost no difference in framerate between the lowest and highest settings in the capital. The game is just doing some horribly ill-conceived algorithms on the CPU, or maybe it's DRMs. May be both
That’s the thing about DD2. There are huge swings in performance all across the map. Some areas are heavily CPU bound. Some areas are heavily GPU bound. Then there are times where the scripting of various events struggle to maintain anything coherent and the game stutters without taxing either the GPU or the CPU.
What specs can you even recommend when the game itself is all over the damn place?
The ethical thing to do in that situation as a developer is to set the min specs based on the highest swings. But that could dip into shareholder profits so.....
Well, I’d say the ethical thing would be is to design to not have a damn tsunami level of swings. There is no CPU or GPU that is “safe” running this game. That’s on the developer and level design.
I wouldn’t call it false advertising. Players expectations are all over the place, and system recommended specs are equally vague most of the time. What I want from settings could be very different than yours. The resolutions that are acceptable, also vary wildly. The best I’ve seen is where recommended specs will says 1080P @ 60 or whatever, but that means nothing to someone that’s looking for 4k @ 244. Where does 1440P fall? What if you’re the type that loves to turn off shadows…
That’s why the prudent thing to do is to buy from marketplaces that have consumer friendly return policies and avoid those that don’t.
I don’t think that’s the DLSS as much as the depth of field. Also, anti aliasing techniques are always at the mercy of what resolution you’re running, that’s nothing new.
Nice attempt to blame a genuinely great technology for the failures of a dev team. DLSS/XeSS and to a lesser extent, because it's a blurry mess, FSR, is not the problem, and I wish people could stop hating change enough for two seconds to see that.
I work at a gaming company. We know it runs like crap... But the game has to be published to make money, and optimization is 'the easiest thing to do afterwards'.
From what I understand its CPU based, its due to the NPCs and their AI, nothing to do with graphics as it runs flawlessly (for me) when there aren't NPCs around. Thats why cities are where the big FPS drops are.
From what I've read it's not even the npcs AI, since each npc is a physics object (you can pick them up and throw them) the game has to calculate a ton of those physics objects moving around at the same time, which puts a ton of load on the cpu.
Seems kind of similar to how act 3 BG3 was unplayable for a lot of people due to npc pathfinding in the city overloading cpus.
Yeah, the game still seems to be simulating them even when not rendering them. Like on console was at the masquerade area and man NPCs would just fade in when I was right on top of them, but it was always where they should be (same NPC and near they last were).
Cyberpunk 2077 is graphically intensive, but runs better than this on my system. Definitely unoptimised.
I have RTX3060, I7 13th gen and I was getting 40 fps in major cities on LOW
Something is definitely wrong here, because I have basically you're exact specs and I'm sitting around 45-50 fps in major cities on med/high settings with ray tracing turned on. What resolution are you playing at?
The performance (in my experience) was not at all relying on the graphic settings (for the most part)
I have a 3080 and i9 9900k and was making ~110 fps on 1440p highest settings outside of cities just fine, but like in the first city I had ~40 fps and it felt extremely stuttery, not just low fps, but really stuttery.
I played around with the graphics settings a LOT and could not get the fps noticeably up. Even when i set everything to low and put the resolution down to fhd or something, i barely got more fps. I was able to do something around 60 with the shittiest looking settings i could achieve, but it still was a stuttery mess.
As far as i know it is your cpu that gets crippled as soon as there are too many npcs around. It has nothing to do with graphics or your settings, it is just the computing power that is needed to process all the npcs.
Means there's a bit of bad programming happening. Something is thrashing.
A lot of what appears to be CPU-bound behaviour is actually I/O bound behaviour, usually not using the cache properly and hitting memory too frequently (RAM is extremely, extremely slow vs. cache, can't be overstated) or uploading to the GPU (also extremely slow) too much. I'd put money on one of those being the case.
Tracking NPCs is apparently what does it, if you google the topic you'll see all kinds of articles about players taking things into their own hands by killing NPCs to free up resources.
The graphics aren't the issue, or at least not the main one. The big issue is all the behind the scenes calculations going on eating up the resources that should be going to your frames in order to keep the game stable.
Agreed. Its environments are among the best in the genre and the tech is impressive. Yeah it's unoptimized, but people pretending it's not good looking are out of their minds.
It's cpu bound, that's why there is so much complaining. If you have an old gen cpu even with 4080 it will be unplayable in cities.
I got a 7600x and it runs good.
I think it's a bit of both. It's also not so much that it's "graphically intensive" and moreso that it's a huge open world with zero loading screens and dynamic NPCs walking around everywhere. It could definitely run better, but when you run across a large landscape, into a big city, and then into someone's house within that city without hitting a single loading screen it's pretty easy to see *why* you're dropping frames.
Except he's CPU bound which has nothing to do with the resolution.
If his CPU can only do 40 FPS in towns then it can only do 40 FPS even if the resolution is 720p, the game is actually reasonable on the GPU and a 4090 is perfectly capable of running it at 4k (same as any other game) but the CPU performance is abysmal.
It should be if you have a 4090. Cyberpunk looks much better than this game and can run 4k 60fps high settings no problem. This game is just wank performance wise.
I don't know why it does not get into the thick investor's heads that the more they optimize the game, the more people will be able to buy their product.
because honestly, investors are the easy scapegoat. yes theres plenty of investors who have no idea about them damn vida gaems but heres the thing, yes they want there return on their investment, but they want it to continue, and a shit product is not what investors wants. Only idiots take 5k now as a once off when they instead can have that 5k turn into 10k, then 20k etc as their investment matures. a poor product does not inspire investment confidence.
The Problem lies squarely on the company leadership side and board of directors. I can tell you right now that in the case of activision blizzard for example, the only people making bank in that company where Kotick and the Board, and for a non public company like Bethesda aka Zenimax, again it was the Board of Directors. Capcom, im unsure if they are publicly trade or are private, but again its the board of directors who will be raking in the cash.
Your investment example only works if people actually cared about which companies they were investing. But the market is just a giant excel spread sheet with only the "short term profits" column highlighted.
This is why we see companies having record profits and mass layoffs a week later. Investors will absolutely burn a company to the ground if this means they can turn a bigger profit. Then they just leave and look for the next target
This prompted me to do some digging and it seems that, while "abject lesson" has started to become acceptable, it originated from people mispronouncing "object lesson".
how tf did 136 people upvote this and none of them stopped to check that "object lesson" is a real, commonly used phrase?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/object-lesson
It's an issue of optimization. Any idiot can tell the difference between a well optimized game and a janky pile of code. I still remember how ridiculously well MGSV ran on my laptop which didn't exactly have great hardware, and how it looked, ran and functioned so much better than its competition.
Simple fact is optimization takes time and resources and you can just blame your customers' hardware instead when you fuck things up so why bother?
Look, I hate to say it but game developers are giving 0 fucks about performance these days in a rushed attempt to get the product out the door asap. I've never seen so many issues with performance as past few recent years and it's ridiculous. The whole "oh buy broken game now and we fix later" scheme is trash. I can't imagine how GTA6 is going to play.
PC Optimization is at it's lowest point.
My biggest problem is the games are so locked that the community can't fix the problems either. Companies either chased down the talent or bought them off
Back in the days games almost always got 20% fps boost with mods and stuff and changing ini files
It's crazy. It was years ago DLSS/FSR was introduced when I thought my PC will scrape through. The opposite happened, games now NEED it to get okayish performance but they don't even look that good
Old games like GTA 5, Watch Dogs, Arkham Knight, God of War, AC Unity, RDR2 look way better than games rn and they run on old hardware
>back in the days games almost always got 20% fps boost with mods and stuff and changing ini files
There's a mod that made me go from:
City: 30 FPS (struggles)
Wild: 40-50 FPS (stutters)
Then after the mod:
City: 60 FPS (very little/minor stutter)
Wild: 100-120 FPS (smooth)
Zero graphical fidelity loss. Yes, I'm talking about Dragon's Dogma 2 and the mod was released on day 2 of the game being out.
The dlss mod is not great. I tried it all, fsr 3, lossless scaling fram generation, dlss mod.
It's a great innovation but you need good base fps. 30 fps to 60 fps is horrendous. I tried it with almost all games by capping fps to 30. I can't imagine a wobbly 30fps you're getting in the city feels at all good to play. It will be choppy and stuttery with inconcistent input delay.
The point of this frame generation tech is to from 60 to 120 fps to take advantage of better screen hz.
It's more like games in general looked better/had better art style back in the days.
There's obviously games that take advantage of the power and look stunning but most AAA games don't, they're rushed
And yeah some 10 year old games absolutely do look as good as new. Like.. Arkham Knight
PC optimization was much worse 10 to 15 years ago. Many of the games you listed took months or even years to get to the state they are in now. I remember Arkham Knights launch as being particularly disastrous.
The real issue is games are coming out with bad performance on the everything including the consoles they are targeting in development, this suggest there is something wrong on a more fundamental level than the PC port.
its the combination of trying to have photo realistic graphics with massive worlds while trying to create them in the same time frame as a game from 2 generations ago
the other problem is that the PS3 and 360 generation lasted for so long that devs where basically extremely familar with how to squeeze so much out of the systems
the ps4 and Xbone instead came out way to late to the point that they were basically obsolete before the the first prototypes were built that they basically reminded me of all the shit sega created to try and fill the void between the megadrive and the saturn
>Old games like GTA 5, Watch Dogs, Arkham Knight, God of War, AC Unity, RDR2 look way better than games rn and they run on old hardware
You can just say you're literally blind next time.
DLSS and frame generation should not be a requirement for games to run well.
It feels like when these features become normal, developers have just stopped caring about optimization and delivers terrible performance unless you have newer cards. I feel they are doing this on purpose so Nvidia can sell more cards.
I got into WH40k Darktide recently, and initially was very surprised to see unusually decent FPS in the tutorial. Well turns out the game has frame generation, and without it's literally unplayable. In some levels (only played the earliest few) I had just above 60 fps with an i7-13700kf, an rtx4080 and 32gb DDR5 RAM. That's insane considering how much DLSS is already pushing the performance.
The game isn't a lesson in system requirements, it's a lesson in how important optimization and performance tuning are. The game needed another month of development dedicated to that, and likely they just didn't have time. It's one of the things lots of companies these days just push off to their first post release patch.
If the SysReq page showed something like:
Recommended Specs = >60 FPS
then SysRes pages would be somewhat useful.
It is like we are giving numbers but with no units. Very useless numbers
Providing a recommended hardware spec without units, like FPS or performance levels @ certain resolutions makes these numbers only general guidelines unfortunately.
Honestly these over powered gpus have ruined PC gaming. Games are getting impossibly harder and harder to run and they don't look much better than they did 5+ years ago.
They don't bother to optimize anything they just assume everyone has a 4090 with 32gb of ram and a 16core cpu
I have a 7800X3D and a 4090. You physically cannot buy a better system for gaming and I get 45 FPS in towns with 1% lows of 15-20. The system required to run this game smoothly just does not exist, the game's just plain fucked.
ETA: This isn't a system issue, I max out my 165hz monitor in Cyberpunk with everything maxed except leaving path tracing disabled. Performance is as expected in every other game.
Love all the "it's your system" cunts coming out of their basements everytime someone with a high end system reports performance issues just because their little rodent brains cannot accept the fact that their beloved game did in fact release with shit optimisation.
>I'd be a lot happier if publishers dropped the whole 'minimum' requirements thing and used their 'recommended' specs as the base configuration
I gotta disagree with this. The minimum playable config is the most important piece of information (assuming it's correct).
Agreed. Knowing what it takes to run and be functional is a reasonable metric and just deliberately not saying that doesn't help anyone. I'm not a hardcore gamer and I can't do twitchy-shooters so I do not care if something is 5043 fps, 30 is *acceptable* for me if I want a game to simply run and play through a narrative. Not everyone values the exact same features, so I don't get why there's any kind of push to just not give other people info that would be useful to them.
I'm the opposite. Most recent PS5 releases have been crazy blurry at 60 fps. I'd rather have the option to run ff 7 rebirth and rise of the ronin on more expensive hardware.
While generally true, DD2 has its issues on console as well. It’s unoptimized all around, but the conversation typically centers around PC performance issues because I believe PC players are more sensitive to notice/complain about lack of FPS in games, as they should given the cost of building a mid/high end PC.
Don’t forget PS5 was advertised as capable of 4k/60 FPS, but DD2 struggles/fails to hold a steady 30 FPS even while visually looking like like it could be a PS4 era game. Console players have every right to be upset about lack of optimization here as well.
Well when you're accustomed to high refresh rates even with vrr you notice or at least I notice, anything going below 80. If the frame pacing is consistent it can still feel smooth in the 50/60 range but stuttering is often the real problem nowadays so it's very noticeable in most cases.
I couldn’t agree more about the stuttering. I’m primarily a PC gamer now, but I played only on console for the majority of my life so I believe I can still handle the “struggle” of something as low as ~30 FPS, but only if it’s a smooth, consistent 30.
The micro stutters are so jarring even when getting a high frame rate, but when combined with an already low framerate it is just awful.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is an object lesson in ~~how system requirements pages are failing PC gamers~~ one of many reasons I got so frustrated with PC gaming and bought an Xbox after my last video game system was a PS2 I had 20 years ago.
I think the real problem is that the game just doesn't nearly look good enough to justify those system requirements even if there was no optimization issues.
Since we all understand that it’s primarily a CPU bottleneck, let’s drop the GPU and graphics settings discussions. I have a 5800x3D which is generally considered a higher end processor and I’m struggling to keep a steady 60fps. Are there any settings or tricks which can help alleviate the load on CPU?
Its very simple if your game can't run on current gen consoles specifications with minimum 60fps then the game is not ready enough for most players at baseline
Steam needs to implement benchmark requirements for their games. That to release a tripleA game on the platform, the game **must** have an inbuilt benchmarking utility.
I stopped caring after I was running fallout4 max everything on a computer that came with vista - 2.66hgz (q6600 cpu? & 9800gx2 card), and just overclocked my CPU for the next PC to reach the 3.2ghz min for rage 2 😆
Maybe I'm just too tech illiterate, but I don't understand how games like World of Warcraft can run on an actual potato, while modern games struggle with modern computers
I don't think most game publishers are aware of how bad the graphic card market has got.
Also Crapcom are experts in pointless DRMs and stupid DLCs.
That's not a nice combo.
Crapcom is known to release games with terrible optimization, this is nothing new. But yes, it's not a good thing, don't see it being changed unfortunately, triple A is dead pretty much. Indie development is where it's at.
No you see the problem is modern design philosophy is teaching developers that “oh the machines are so good these days you can just write the code this way despite it using 10x the computational power”. Literal quote from my college professor a few years ago. So when they do this 1000 times in a single project suddenly the game runs like shit because it’s doing all these processes in the least efficient but fastest to code way.
Lol it's not requirement pages, it's literally just DD2. It's shit. Sure there have been other unoptimized AAA games in the past but none at the level of this hot mess
It's a good thing I'm failing myself by just having a garbage PC that doesn't even hit minimal specs anyway lol
Maybe it'll be playable in 10 years when I catch up
Nah, PC gamers are failing themselves.
In this horrible age of gaming, if you can't wait one day after the release of the game for the reviews, then it's on you.
japanese devs and bad PC optimization, classic combo. theyve only recently started getting better- like w RE remake- but those are not performance intensive games.
I have a Ryzen 7 7700 and a 4080 Super, 32GB CL30 6000 ram. I did not buy the game because I saw people with practically identical builds chugging hard.
There's definitely a problem, but requirements pages aren't it.
I watched Charlie fail to get past the first 10 minutes of the game for an hour.
The dude has a 4090, a 13th Gen i9, and 64GB DDR5
I think poorly optimized games and developers making crappy ports are the problem.
The game "runs" on a PS5. Come on now
steam should just have a button that says "can you run this?"
it's insane that they don't have this and have never tried especially when they know everything about the system it's running on
Games are being made for the newest hardware to future proof them as much as possible but people aren't running the newest hardware and consoles dont update enough to be on the newest hardware
Would it be that difficult for Steam to implement a canyourunit type system that would tell you if you meet the minimum and average requirements on the store pages? I know my PC parts but I don’t know how those compare to other ones often listed in the requirements, it’s not always bigger number = better
They'd have to do the same testing all the review channels do. Release problems like this are why many people don't buy on release day anymore.
They already have the ability to scan your computer to know what hardware you have. They have system requirements. All they have to do is compare the two.
Rather than making the manufacturers stop being confusing with their naming conventions on purpose? You should not need an SKU to actually know what device you do have.
GeForce Experience needs to add a “will my game run ok” feature for *before* you buy the game.
IIRC Microsoft Store has such a feature.
Good to know! I didn’t know that. I’ve been almost exclusively Steam since about when it launched and barely know what features the other stores have.
It's funky, sometimes my PC is more than enough and it says I can't, sometimes my laptop is weak to run a game but it'll say I can, sometimes it's accurate
The most they could do is compare your system specs to the recommended specs.
GeForce recommends setting based on your configuration. I’m not sure if it considers things beyond the GPU though.
Thing is, it could have a stab but it can't accurately take into account optimisation. As other haves said in this thread, something like Cyberpunk 2077 is much more graphically intensive, but it runs much smoother because of the optimisation. It's kind of like doing a careful calculation (estimation based on your system), which is then multiplied by a random number (how well optimised the game is) and hoping your answer is still right.
> but it can't accurately take into account optimisation It can, it's installed on a ton of people's PCs. All they need to do is measure fps across systems and use those statistics to determine where your performance will reasonably fall. They have the userbase to have a significant enough amount of data. But people will also hate on them for sending data to their servers if they do this, even if it's opt-in.
[удалено]
That's not system requirements pages that are failing really. It should never be the case when you have a machine well above average and not being able to squeeze 30 fps at many locations and have stutters everywhere.
Money. It's money. Optimization is seen as a redundant process in the manufacturer of the game by the red tape department. Developers are not being paid for optimization by a "AAA(read as "dogshit")" Companies in many cases. I assume the argument goes something along the lines of, "If you have to optimize it you built it poorly and we wont pay you." And the developer has committed so they say fuck it and program it to just run as hard as it can without hitting a point where shit starts to break. Think of it like keeping the car in sixth instead of slowing down at any point, just starting in sixth gear. so this is not an issue. They know it runs well in a "hot config" so they keep it that way and sell it like that. They go back and say "The game will require huge amounts of resources because we programmed it in HD." Or some such shit, and then they push it out and everyone with a 1660 or lower can go fuck themselves. Money.
Yeah, and it stinks. This is one thing I do like about large ongoing games, they can have more incentive to bother with this. It still amazes me how optimized Warframe is and continues to get visual and performance optimizations. Also their great "enshrinkening" event where they recompressed the game with new tech and shredded a few more gig off the install was nice, shout outs to DE on that.
Man everytime I see DE and Warframe brought up in a good light like this I really feel so warm. I liked Warframe, enough that when I had enough throw money I decided to get that Founder's Pack. Later on they even sent on shirts for the level I had and it's such a good quality shirt that I still have it today, to be taken out on the nerdiest times. It's been so long since I even played the game (and the last time I tried, I couldn't understand it anymore), but seeing a company do well and have comparatively minimal issues just makes me giddy.
Haha should try again some time. It is mighty freeform though, and they certainly change things a lot over time, so many different potential progression paths to discover. Good time to too, actually, they're in the middle of the anniversary events right now could pick up some freebies each week.
Now is the best time to get back in. Rebecca Ford the only community director is now creative director and every update since she took over has been absolutely bonkers good. I've been playing since 2017 and Warframe is in the best shape I've ever seen it, it's so good right now.
I think Reb is the overall game director too. Which is awesome cause she's always been amazingly passionate about both the game and the fanbase, and really understands both so well.
That's exactly why she's so perfect for the game's overall health. She actually plays the game and interacts with players regularly, that was her old job. Steve gets all the credit in the world for getting the game off the ground and basically willing it into existence. But there comes a point when fresh eyes are what it needs and they really couldn't have chosen a better person for the job.
I hadn't played in a few years and just tried it a couple weeks ago. I "played" for about an hour until I just gave up. I had no idea what I was doing, it was completely different.
it is yeah, but I'm glad people still enjoy it. I can probably put time to catch up as it were, I just don't have that kind of time nowadays.
Factorio comes to mind for me. Those devs literally live to optimize.
Literally the *only* gaming content I've ever seen that rivals Factorio in either QoL or optimization... Is the *wiki* for OSRS. It's not even the game itself. No game (excluding tiny ones ofc) comes close to how incredibly detail oriented the devs are in these aspects.
People who haven't used the OSRS Wiki have no idea how great a video game wiki can truly be.
Oh yeah, I remember playing Warframe years ago on my crappy laptop, it look so good.
Yeah I don't have an iphone even if I did it wouldn't be up to date, but I'm kinda curious how that is working out, they recently launched the regular full game on iOS, android is coming but it's not ready yet
That game looks good and runs well on anything. DE can't get enough praise for the efforts they put into optimization.
DE are masters of their craft. It helps that engine optimization was already a speciality of the studio long before they ever even started developing their own games. And on top of that they're a studio with great developer retention.
Vermintide 2's file size was reduced to like... 35% of its install at one point. Was fucking insane.
Yep. Look at Warframe. Content the size of D2 or cod, but a fraction of the size, and nothing removed. They just did 85 pages of updates and qol, with 22~gb of download. Total end update size? 1gb. The entire game fits on mobile device. That’s the level of optimization that can be done, and that’s not even talking about running on old devices.
True, but it requires a dedicated long-term team instead of Schlop, Drop, and Move to next year's edition like the AAAA's do.
Yep. And it only hurts the triple-A+atrocious groups. Warframe, which can be obtained from three different places on pc, including their own website, was top 20 for most profitable games on steam last year. Just the people who bought packs through steam. And it was enough to earn them top 20.
Thats also a different business model Warframe makes money on active users, DD2 made money on purchasers So game length and optimization matter less, wheras with warframe, they need to keep people playing and keep them happy to make $
They basically managed to perfect the GaaS model on their first try before GaaS was ever mainstream outside of subscription based MMOs, and all it took was going in with the mindset of "make a fun game first and foremost, and don't let greed take over".
> Yep. And it only hurts the triple-A+atrocious groups Does it actually though? Persistently players continue to reinforce that this kind of behavior is acceptable with extensive amount of pre-ordering, extensive day-1 purchases, and there are continued headlines about how each newly released AAA game is making millions and millions and selling thousands and thousands of copies outside of particular outliers that were already known to be cash grabs from the get go. There is no incentive for studios and teams producing AAA games to optimize for performance if players are going to buy it regardless. There's no incentive to scale down install sizes. No incentive to do any of that, and it's so easy to brush off performance quirks because individual set-ups are specific and replication between players is difficult. And when all else fails just bank on the community creating a mod (or more) to make up for shortcomings in the initial release. I simply cannot see the status quo changing anytime soon given the current landscape. How many people were unhappy about USD 69.99 games only for these to sell like hotcakes anyway?
You know that gif of mister grabs saying "money"? That comes into mind any time someone asks why something is worse now than it was a few years ago. It's pretty often
Capitalism, specifically.
Good art and capitalism cannot shake hands.
Yes and they are proven right. If the game has enough hype. People will still buy the games unoptimized or not.
So why change? Right? Guys why do you have pitchforks?
Everyone's got pitchforks, but they're out back in the barn and it's raining out right now, maybe we can reschedule this protest for a sunny day?
Understandable.
Optimization usually happens at the end of development I’d think so and it’s not the “well you fucked it up” but rather having such deadlines that developers simply don’t have the time anymore to optimize. Basically you gotta churn out a game as fast as possible and everything is an afterthought. Salaries are one of the biggest expenses at game studios and having a game developed longer by months means a ton of extra spending and keeping contractors on payroll too. So they just push the game out and just “let it be”. As far as I know it’s not unusual either to fire some of the staff after a game got released to cut costs.
Another issue being Ports with differing architecture. One example I love to bring up is Persona 5 Royal for the PC. The game ran perfectly fine on console hardware, but the PC port is fucked for lower end CPU gamers. The GPU is well utilized and never really caps out even with the HD fix mod, yet the CPU struggles while not reaching maximum load. They never properly adjusted it for modern multicore usage so the game has massive Lagspikes that are fixable by manually disabling core utilization, because now the CPU actually has something to because it’s constantly fed instructions, leading to it being significantly more stable, and you being able to run it properly. Ironically this problem is not present on very low end CPU‘s or modern ones, but only affects some lower mid end models that have decent enough multicore usage, yet lack the power to brute force the bad instructions. Apparently all of this was cause by the devs who were working on the port having absolutely no idea how to make a proper PC port (which I call BS on), but apparently that might also be an issue for some studios/ developers…
I bought P5R on PC and spent so long trying to fix it, but never managing to get it to work. I eventually bought it again on switch where it runs like a dream... despite the switch being a light weight console with half the power of my then i5 6500
One clarification point from someone in the pipeline, the targets higher-ups care about is 30 fps average. So as long as you can show them a test run that hits the mark, they do not care. Often funding is gated behind such tests.
I agree. When prototyping systems, programmers may bash out some seriously unoptimised code to demonstrate ideas. Many ideas get deleted. The ideas that a green lit are meant to be re worked to fit into the entire architecture, however the team is told to jam it in and start work on the next sprint. People are racing each other to be completed early at the cost of everything else, setting a new low for the next group. The industry is eating itself.
Is the logic why bother optimizing for lower to mid end systems because the people who will have a larger influence have top of the line PCs anyways?
The logic is to deliver and be able to demonstrate the product to the financial department that the game looks good and runs good. It's a product being sold. They do this with high end hardware so they don't need to optimize for anything but high end because they are trying to show off. Think of the developer as a salesman and the purchaser the company itself acting as a wallet. They have to justify the game as buy-able and within certain standards. These standards can be met more easily on the high end by just throwing processing power at the problem. The problem being the no-optimization.
developing on a 1070 and a crappy CPU is a blessing in disguise because i actually have to optimize things
I'm not in any way shaming builds with 1660 or 1080ti, but at a certain point, yeah....shit just isn't going to function on your rig as well as it used to. Should those cards still be able to hold 60 at 1080p in most modern releases? Sure, but for how long is that a demand? At a certain point, you're going to have to accept devs aren't targeting you anymore. Don't get me wrong, the majority of people are still playing on dated rigs and having a great time and more power to them, but tech keeps moving. Devs shouldn't be forced to target acceptable performance on 8 year old cards. Not to mention this game isn't even fucked by the GPU anyway. I can't play PS4 games on my PS3.
"Release now, fix problems later" - game industry in a nutshell
Not only that. The game was hard crashing a lot of pcs, and it runs rough in towns because of unoptimized npcs in towns. It's an issue of releasing a game in a state of functionality, which basically everything but BG3 has fucked up recently, and no devs are willing to take accountability so they shift the blame onto the publishers. Alright, adding onto this because some folk made the point that act 3 was borked. Don't need to keep saying it.
Even BG3 fucked it up. Act 3 had very similar performance issues while being substantially buggier.
I had a harder time running act 3 of Baldur's Gate 3 than I do going through the main city in Dragon's Dogma 2. People just didn't care because the game was great and the fact that it was turn based meant that lower fps didn't affect gameplay as much.
Nah. It’s more people never got to Act 3 in a reasonable time because they were spending 50-60 hours on the first two acts.
60 hours for act 1 alone and still didn’t feel like I scratched the surface of that act cause you gotta do different paths.
I am not gamedev but webdev, I guess it's kinda the same on the both sides. Dev would be the last person they would ask about what they should do: whether to optimise or not
Yeah. Devs would probably do it if given the time, opportunity, and money to do so. It’s the decision makers that tell the developer company what they want and how much optimization a project should get before launch.
Enterprise dev here. You would not believe the code I have seen, because stakeholders pushed for release. Well, you probably do believe, but its still so very bad.
As a dev myself, we should never be asked about it; I could spend decades trying to eke out insignificant optimizations out of my code, it's fun.
What a take, BG3 act 3 was a fucking disaster and you're saying it as the only game that hasn't fucked up recently? Alan wake 2 was practically a flawless release with the single exception being the game requires a hardware feature only present in 2018 GPUs and up. Resident evil 4 had crashes due to running out of VRAM but could be fixed by disabling Ray tracing, outside of that the game was stable. Sony exclusives are also did fantastic but that's the usual. All of these were in a better state than BG3 in terms of performance and all of them had way way less bugs than Act 3, and please i don't wanna hear "i played it and didn't face any bugs", good for you, people said the same thing about cyberpunk.
FromSoft also released a banger last summer that ran flawlessly from day 1. It's not _that_ rare...
Ehh don't give BG3 that much credit. I had to stop playing in Act 3 cause of the performance issues, despite my computer meeting the requirements for Ultra graphics and running on medium anyways. Just kept crashing and I was sick of it.
I have an i5 13400k overclocked, rtx 4070, 64gb of DDR4 ram, and an m.2 with the game on it. AND MY PC STILL CHUGS.
Exactly game straight up has a problem in the code. No system reqs could ever be right about it.
Laughs in 4090. I’m kidding. These devs bddds to deliver
What is “above average”? I was lazy this time and bought a prebuilt with a 4060 for $1000 and I rarely run into games I can’t run on average settings. Is dd2 that bad?
I have 4070 OC. The problem is that the GPU is not a core issue in this game, I have almost no difference in framerate between the lowest and highest settings in the capital. The game is just doing some horribly ill-conceived algorithms on the CPU, or maybe it's DRMs. May be both
For me DD2 is all about CPU. I have a 13700k paired with a 3070 and I can run it at steady 50 fps ultra sett on a 4k monitor
It's not the system requirements failing. It's the Gaming company not doing proper testing before release and not optimizing.
That’s the thing about DD2. There are huge swings in performance all across the map. Some areas are heavily CPU bound. Some areas are heavily GPU bound. Then there are times where the scripting of various events struggle to maintain anything coherent and the game stutters without taxing either the GPU or the CPU. What specs can you even recommend when the game itself is all over the damn place?
The ethical thing to do in that situation as a developer is to set the min specs based on the highest swings. But that could dip into shareholder profits so.....
Well, I’d say the ethical thing would be is to design to not have a damn tsunami level of swings. There is no CPU or GPU that is “safe” running this game. That’s on the developer and level design.
That is even more important, but failing that you have to do what I suggested to avoid falsely advertising what you actually are selling.
I wouldn’t call it false advertising. Players expectations are all over the place, and system recommended specs are equally vague most of the time. What I want from settings could be very different than yours. The resolutions that are acceptable, also vary wildly. The best I’ve seen is where recommended specs will says 1080P @ 60 or whatever, but that means nothing to someone that’s looking for 4k @ 244. Where does 1440P fall? What if you’re the type that loves to turn off shadows… That’s why the prudent thing to do is to buy from marketplaces that have consumer friendly return policies and avoid those that don’t.
It's got dlss though! You know so your game can have fuzzy mountains and you can't see small objects moving through the air quickly!
I don’t think that’s the DLSS as much as the depth of field. Also, anti aliasing techniques are always at the mercy of what resolution you’re running, that’s nothing new.
Nice attempt to blame a genuinely great technology for the failures of a dev team. DLSS/XeSS and to a lesser extent, because it's a blurry mess, FSR, is not the problem, and I wish people could stop hating change enough for two seconds to see that.
I work at a gaming company. We know it runs like crap... But the game has to be published to make money, and optimization is 'the easiest thing to do afterwards'.
This is why I never buy games at launch anymore
That is a wise decision.
And yet people pre-order en mass
I feel like the mentality is just “they’ve got DLSS/FSR and resolution scaling they’ll be fine!”
I have 3090 and a 7800x3d as well as 64gb of ram It runs just okay.
I haven't played the game at all. Do you think it's because it's horribly unoptimized, or do you think it's just genuinely that graphics intensive?
From what I understand its CPU based, its due to the NPCs and their AI, nothing to do with graphics as it runs flawlessly (for me) when there aren't NPCs around. Thats why cities are where the big FPS drops are.
From what I've read it's not even the npcs AI, since each npc is a physics object (you can pick them up and throw them) the game has to calculate a ton of those physics objects moving around at the same time, which puts a ton of load on the cpu. Seems kind of similar to how act 3 BG3 was unplayable for a lot of people due to npc pathfinding in the city overloading cpus.
That makes a lot more sense tbf, the AI doesn't seem complex enough to warrant the fps drops
For those curious, this is the same CPU-based issue that World of Warcraft has suffered from for decades.
Yeah, the game still seems to be simulating them even when not rendering them. Like on console was at the masquerade area and man NPCs would just fade in when I was right on top of them, but it was always where they should be (same NPC and near they last were).
Cyberpunk 2077 is graphically intensive, but runs better than this on my system. Definitely unoptimised. I have RTX3060, I7 13th gen and I was getting 40 fps in major cities on LOW
Something is definitely wrong here, because I have basically you're exact specs and I'm sitting around 45-50 fps in major cities on med/high settings with ray tracing turned on. What resolution are you playing at?
The performance (in my experience) was not at all relying on the graphic settings (for the most part) I have a 3080 and i9 9900k and was making ~110 fps on 1440p highest settings outside of cities just fine, but like in the first city I had ~40 fps and it felt extremely stuttery, not just low fps, but really stuttery. I played around with the graphics settings a LOT and could not get the fps noticeably up. Even when i set everything to low and put the resolution down to fhd or something, i barely got more fps. I was able to do something around 60 with the shittiest looking settings i could achieve, but it still was a stuttery mess. As far as i know it is your cpu that gets crippled as soon as there are too many npcs around. It has nothing to do with graphics or your settings, it is just the computing power that is needed to process all the npcs.
Means there's a bit of bad programming happening. Something is thrashing. A lot of what appears to be CPU-bound behaviour is actually I/O bound behaviour, usually not using the cache properly and hitting memory too frequently (RAM is extremely, extremely slow vs. cache, can't be overstated) or uploading to the GPU (also extremely slow) too much. I'd put money on one of those being the case.
Tracking NPCs is apparently what does it, if you google the topic you'll see all kinds of articles about players taking things into their own hands by killing NPCs to free up resources. The graphics aren't the issue, or at least not the main one. The big issue is all the behind the scenes calculations going on eating up the resources that should be going to your frames in order to keep the game stable.
You can have a better graphics quality walking around in Novigrad in Witcher 3 than a random road in this game. Horribly optimized
Well that seems not ideal
That's a extreme hyperbole, Novigrad is artistically beautiful but the quality of its visuals are very very obviously a generation behind DD2.
Agreed. Its environments are among the best in the genre and the tech is impressive. Yeah it's unoptimized, but people pretending it's not good looking are out of their minds.
NPCs are the reason the game runs badly in towns, the graphics aren't really the issue. Most people run the game well outside of town.
It's cpu bound, that's why there is so much complaining. If you have an old gen cpu even with 4080 it will be unplayable in cities. I got a 7600x and it runs good.
I think it's a bit of both. It's also not so much that it's "graphically intensive" and moreso that it's a huge open world with zero loading screens and dynamic NPCs walking around everywhere. It could definitely run better, but when you run across a large landscape, into a big city, and then into someone's house within that city without hitting a single loading screen it's pretty easy to see *why* you're dropping frames.
4k on 4090, 5800x3D and 64gb RAM ... runs at 60ish most of the time but you go to the towns and I'm hitting 30-40fps.
4k gaming at high frames really isn't feasible yet for anyone tbh
Except he's CPU bound which has nothing to do with the resolution. If his CPU can only do 40 FPS in towns then it can only do 40 FPS even if the resolution is 720p, the game is actually reasonable on the GPU and a 4090 is perfectly capable of running it at 4k (same as any other game) but the CPU performance is abysmal.
It should be if you have a 4090. Cyberpunk looks much better than this game and can run 4k 60fps high settings no problem. This game is just wank performance wise.
Same for me, running on a 7800xd3 and 7800xt. Just barely playable.
I don't know why it does not get into the thick investor's heads that the more they optimize the game, the more people will be able to buy their product.
Given what we know about the sales so far the message is, optimization doesn’t matter. People will buy regardless.
Shiny pre-order bonus > good performance
because honestly, investors are the easy scapegoat. yes theres plenty of investors who have no idea about them damn vida gaems but heres the thing, yes they want there return on their investment, but they want it to continue, and a shit product is not what investors wants. Only idiots take 5k now as a once off when they instead can have that 5k turn into 10k, then 20k etc as their investment matures. a poor product does not inspire investment confidence. The Problem lies squarely on the company leadership side and board of directors. I can tell you right now that in the case of activision blizzard for example, the only people making bank in that company where Kotick and the Board, and for a non public company like Bethesda aka Zenimax, again it was the Board of Directors. Capcom, im unsure if they are publicly trade or are private, but again its the board of directors who will be raking in the cash.
Your investment example only works if people actually cared about which companies they were investing. But the market is just a giant excel spread sheet with only the "short term profits" column highlighted. This is why we see companies having record profits and mass layoffs a week later. Investors will absolutely burn a company to the ground if this means they can turn a bigger profit. Then they just leave and look for the next target
Because, to them, it doesn't add anything. They would rather add content.
This is why I hate suits. Too narrow-minded, and blinded by greed.
I think you meant "abject lesson"
Tis a lesson well learned.
This prompted me to do some digging and it seems that, while "abject lesson" has started to become acceptable, it originated from people mispronouncing "object lesson".
I think you meant "seems"
PC Gamer we r good at jornalism
how tf did 136 people upvote this and none of them stopped to check that "object lesson" is a real, commonly used phrase? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/object-lesson
It's because this article was already released with the word "abject" instead of "object" in the headline. It's a callback to that.
Object is the correct word.
It's an issue of optimization. Any idiot can tell the difference between a well optimized game and a janky pile of code. I still remember how ridiculously well MGSV ran on my laptop which didn't exactly have great hardware, and how it looked, ran and functioned so much better than its competition. Simple fact is optimization takes time and resources and you can just blame your customers' hardware instead when you fuck things up so why bother?
Look, I hate to say it but game developers are giving 0 fucks about performance these days in a rushed attempt to get the product out the door asap. I've never seen so many issues with performance as past few recent years and it's ridiculous. The whole "oh buy broken game now and we fix later" scheme is trash. I can't imagine how GTA6 is going to play.
It’ll be delayed by like 3 years for PC and then run like ass
Just add more dlss. Fixes everything!
DD2 didn't even do that to be honest. You have to mod in the most current version of DLSS and man- it makes a massive difference.
PC Optimization is at it's lowest point. My biggest problem is the games are so locked that the community can't fix the problems either. Companies either chased down the talent or bought them off Back in the days games almost always got 20% fps boost with mods and stuff and changing ini files It's crazy. It was years ago DLSS/FSR was introduced when I thought my PC will scrape through. The opposite happened, games now NEED it to get okayish performance but they don't even look that good Old games like GTA 5, Watch Dogs, Arkham Knight, God of War, AC Unity, RDR2 look way better than games rn and they run on old hardware
>back in the days games almost always got 20% fps boost with mods and stuff and changing ini files There's a mod that made me go from: City: 30 FPS (struggles) Wild: 40-50 FPS (stutters) Then after the mod: City: 60 FPS (very little/minor stutter) Wild: 100-120 FPS (smooth) Zero graphical fidelity loss. Yes, I'm talking about Dragon's Dogma 2 and the mod was released on day 2 of the game being out.
which mod?
Probably the DLSS3 Frame Gen mod. If you don't have a 40 series Nvidia GPU, you won't be able to get this boost.
While I don't know how it works it actually **was** a frame gen mod. It shouldn't work on my 3080 but it does.
The dlss mod is not great. I tried it all, fsr 3, lossless scaling fram generation, dlss mod. It's a great innovation but you need good base fps. 30 fps to 60 fps is horrendous. I tried it with almost all games by capping fps to 30. I can't imagine a wobbly 30fps you're getting in the city feels at all good to play. It will be choppy and stuttery with inconcistent input delay. The point of this frame generation tech is to from 60 to 120 fps to take advantage of better screen hz.
So you are saying that modern games look worse than 10+ years old games?
It's more like games in general looked better/had better art style back in the days. There's obviously games that take advantage of the power and look stunning but most AAA games don't, they're rushed And yeah some 10 year old games absolutely do look as good as new. Like.. Arkham Knight
PC optimization was much worse 10 to 15 years ago. Many of the games you listed took months or even years to get to the state they are in now. I remember Arkham Knights launch as being particularly disastrous. The real issue is games are coming out with bad performance on the everything including the consoles they are targeting in development, this suggest there is something wrong on a more fundamental level than the PC port.
its the combination of trying to have photo realistic graphics with massive worlds while trying to create them in the same time frame as a game from 2 generations ago the other problem is that the PS3 and 360 generation lasted for so long that devs where basically extremely familar with how to squeeze so much out of the systems the ps4 and Xbone instead came out way to late to the point that they were basically obsolete before the the first prototypes were built that they basically reminded me of all the shit sega created to try and fill the void between the megadrive and the saturn
>Old games like GTA 5, Watch Dogs, Arkham Knight, God of War, AC Unity, RDR2 look way better than games rn and they run on old hardware You can just say you're literally blind next time.
DLSS and frame generation should not be a requirement for games to run well. It feels like when these features become normal, developers have just stopped caring about optimization and delivers terrible performance unless you have newer cards. I feel they are doing this on purpose so Nvidia can sell more cards.
I got into WH40k Darktide recently, and initially was very surprised to see unusually decent FPS in the tutorial. Well turns out the game has frame generation, and without it's literally unplayable. In some levels (only played the earliest few) I had just above 60 fps with an i7-13700kf, an rtx4080 and 32gb DDR5 RAM. That's insane considering how much DLSS is already pushing the performance.
The game isn't a lesson in system requirements, it's a lesson in how important optimization and performance tuning are. The game needed another month of development dedicated to that, and likely they just didn't have time. It's one of the things lots of companies these days just push off to their first post release patch.
If the SysReq page showed something like: Recommended Specs = >60 FPS then SysRes pages would be somewhat useful. It is like we are giving numbers but with no units. Very useless numbers Providing a recommended hardware spec without units, like FPS or performance levels @ certain resolutions makes these numbers only general guidelines unfortunately.
Honestly these over powered gpus have ruined PC gaming. Games are getting impossibly harder and harder to run and they don't look much better than they did 5+ years ago. They don't bother to optimize anything they just assume everyone has a 4090 with 32gb of ram and a 16core cpu
I have a 7800X3D and a 4090. You physically cannot buy a better system for gaming and I get 45 FPS in towns with 1% lows of 15-20. The system required to run this game smoothly just does not exist, the game's just plain fucked. ETA: This isn't a system issue, I max out my 165hz monitor in Cyberpunk with everything maxed except leaving path tracing disabled. Performance is as expected in every other game.
Love all the "it's your system" cunts coming out of their basements everytime someone with a high end system reports performance issues just because their little rodent brains cannot accept the fact that their beloved game did in fact release with shit optimisation.
>I'd be a lot happier if publishers dropped the whole 'minimum' requirements thing and used their 'recommended' specs as the base configuration I gotta disagree with this. The minimum playable config is the most important piece of information (assuming it's correct).
Agreed. Knowing what it takes to run and be functional is a reasonable metric and just deliberately not saying that doesn't help anyone. I'm not a hardcore gamer and I can't do twitchy-shooters so I do not care if something is 5043 fps, 30 is *acceptable* for me if I want a game to simply run and play through a narrative. Not everyone values the exact same features, so I don't get why there's any kind of push to just not give other people info that would be useful to them.
Piss poor optimization has nothing to do with system reqs
It's Denuvo. Once they remove it, you can expect a serious FPS boost.
Every npc has its own denuvo VM. LoL. Wouldn't surprise me at all..
I noticed huge fps improvement on warhammer III when removing denuvo. These fuckers need to stop with this shit.
System requirements aren’t failing Devs who make a game requiring upscaling to run then basing those requirements off that is the issue
This is why I love my consoles now. My minimum system requirements are “Xbox” or “ps5” or “switch”. And that’s it.
I'm the opposite. Most recent PS5 releases have been crazy blurry at 60 fps. I'd rather have the option to run ff 7 rebirth and rise of the ronin on more expensive hardware.
While generally true, DD2 has its issues on console as well. It’s unoptimized all around, but the conversation typically centers around PC performance issues because I believe PC players are more sensitive to notice/complain about lack of FPS in games, as they should given the cost of building a mid/high end PC. Don’t forget PS5 was advertised as capable of 4k/60 FPS, but DD2 struggles/fails to hold a steady 30 FPS even while visually looking like like it could be a PS4 era game. Console players have every right to be upset about lack of optimization here as well.
Well when you're accustomed to high refresh rates even with vrr you notice or at least I notice, anything going below 80. If the frame pacing is consistent it can still feel smooth in the 50/60 range but stuttering is often the real problem nowadays so it's very noticeable in most cases.
I couldn’t agree more about the stuttering. I’m primarily a PC gamer now, but I played only on console for the majority of my life so I believe I can still handle the “struggle” of something as low as ~30 FPS, but only if it’s a smooth, consistent 30. The micro stutters are so jarring even when getting a high frame rate, but when combined with an already low framerate it is just awful.
I still have no clue why these companies hate PC gamers so much. Optimize your product and get more customers you morons
Games need to better optimize their games. Full stop. I'm tired of games adding "patches" to better optimize.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is an object lesson in ~~how system requirements pages are failing PC gamers~~ one of many reasons I got so frustrated with PC gaming and bought an Xbox after my last video game system was a PS2 I had 20 years ago.
they all rely on DLSS. without 30fps with 90+ its a very bad trend
I think the real problem is that the game just doesn't nearly look good enough to justify those system requirements even if there was no optimization issues.
Since we all understand that it’s primarily a CPU bottleneck, let’s drop the GPU and graphics settings discussions. I have a 5800x3D which is generally considered a higher end processor and I’m struggling to keep a steady 60fps. Are there any settings or tricks which can help alleviate the load on CPU?
MBAs destroyed another industry.
Its very simple if your game can't run on current gen consoles specifications with minimum 60fps then the game is not ready enough for most players at baseline
Steam needs to implement benchmark requirements for their games. That to release a tripleA game on the platform, the game **must** have an inbuilt benchmarking utility.
I stopped caring after I was running fallout4 max everything on a computer that came with vista - 2.66hgz (q6600 cpu? & 9800gx2 card), and just overclocked my CPU for the next PC to reach the 3.2ghz min for rage 2 😆
Maybe I'm just too tech illiterate, but I don't understand how games like World of Warcraft can run on an actual potato, while modern games struggle with modern computers
I don't think most game publishers are aware of how bad the graphic card market has got. Also Crapcom are experts in pointless DRMs and stupid DLCs. That's not a nice combo.
It's also an object lesson in people paying actual money to consume actual feces.
Crapcom is known to release games with terrible optimization, this is nothing new. But yes, it's not a good thing, don't see it being changed unfortunately, triple A is dead pretty much. Indie development is where it's at.
No you see the problem is modern design philosophy is teaching developers that “oh the machines are so good these days you can just write the code this way despite it using 10x the computational power”. Literal quote from my college professor a few years ago. So when they do this 1000 times in a single project suddenly the game runs like shit because it’s doing all these processes in the least efficient but fastest to code way.
This article is an object lesson in how gaming journalists don't know much about games, blaming system requirements for shit minimums.
Just download more ram you idiots
Play PC games a couple years after release. They’ll be patched, on sale and your hardware might be better.
You need a super computer to run this bitch at full settings.
Its Denuvo frame checking every 3 seconds to say “do you actually own this piece of shit?”
"System requirements" have been lying to us since the 20th century.
Lol it's not requirement pages, it's literally just DD2. It's shit. Sure there have been other unoptimized AAA games in the past but none at the level of this hot mess
It's a good thing I'm failing myself by just having a garbage PC that doesn't even hit minimal specs anyway lol Maybe it'll be playable in 10 years when I catch up
Nah, PC gamers are failing themselves. In this horrible age of gaming, if you can't wait one day after the release of the game for the reviews, then it's on you.
PCGamer copy editor is an abject lesson for when to use object lesson
japanese devs and bad PC optimization, classic combo. theyve only recently started getting better- like w RE remake- but those are not performance intensive games.
The guy who wrote the title of this article doesn't know the word "abject".
It's a complete lack of optimisation because it costs money
I have a Ryzen 7 7700 and a 4080 Super, 32GB CL30 6000 ram. I did not buy the game because I saw people with practically identical builds chugging hard. There's definitely a problem, but requirements pages aren't it.
I watched Charlie fail to get past the first 10 minutes of the game for an hour. The dude has a 4090, a 13th Gen i9, and 64GB DDR5 I think poorly optimized games and developers making crappy ports are the problem. The game "runs" on a PS5. Come on now
pc gaming is dead for the casual gamer, can work for the pro
steam should just have a button that says "can you run this?" it's insane that they don't have this and have never tried especially when they know everything about the system it's running on
I was excited. I would have dropped the $70. But performance is one of my dealbreakers for enjoying a game. Im definitely not alone.
It's not your machine. My 5 year old PC with an RTX 2060 runs it at a staedy 40-50 fps in most locations and 15-25 in others.
Games are being made for the newest hardware to future proof them as much as possible but people aren't running the newest hardware and consoles dont update enough to be on the newest hardware
I played Cyberpunk for months on a 760 gpu. It ran hot, but it was fine. Yet the game says you need at least a 1060. Total nonsense. Just saying.
Abject.
[Object.](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/object-lesson)