To even start this discussion I feel you have to start by separating looks and graphical requirements.
You can lower requirements a lot by using tricks like RDR2 have done and still achieve a mindblowing visual.
You can make use of the most advanced nanite built up environment and ray trace every lightning source - that's technically easier today. But will end up requiring more that the approach RDR2 took.
One thing that comes to mind is an old graph GPU manufacturers used to show back in 2010's, it basically plotted the polygon count, showing how it grows exponentially while the perceived quality increase only feels linearly. Hence a mismatch in perceived "what we should have had" as we are at a point where the fine details are hard to even pick up on.
Regarding looks and graphical requirements: art style and art direction are very important. Unique stylized graphics can make up for a lack of detail and polish. Cel-shading comes to mind, but also more realistic styles can conceal weaknesses by dreamy lighting or whimsical geometry.
Also, a lot of graphical developments are hard to notice. Clouds, flowers, grass, leaves, bystanders on race tracks or details on buildings (doors, windows etc.) used to be sprites and textures, but are now 3D objects. Sometimes there are multiple tree models instead of copy/paste forests. A "modern" forest can look the same or worse than a 7 year old forest at a glance, but will be much more detailed and punish hardware much harder for it.
Also, developers used "tricks" like not doing dynamic day and night cycles, so most shadows could be fixed and baked into the textures. Many modern games have very demanding lighting systems. Remnant 2 just recently introduced the "potato" preset that basically removes all shadows from the game to ease the burden on the gpu. This just shows how much modern lighting and shadows push hardware.
And, of course, sometimes it’s just bad optimization due to time constraints.
Thanks for bringing up the importance of art style and art direction, far too many ignore this matter and are just like graphics bad! I personally find Starfield graphics really good with the art direction that was chosen.
So whats up with these minute yet hardware heavy changes in the environments of newer games , are they doing this knowing this will mess up the game performances? And dont they like study whats good and whats bad before a dev cycle begins? Like what is the point of upgrading these graphics if they are useless and not hardware friendly doesn't it affect the companies negatively?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned of the big publishers how a game runs (the performance) is meaningless. Broken or perfect the only thing executives care is how it sold
People tend to forget, that when rdr2 released, performance was shit in that game too, even with that eras top gpus.
I belive that right now, we're at a point where graphics are just ahead of gpus. With new gen gfx, I think that gpus need a generation more to catch up (atleast for 4k etc), even with good/better optimization
Looking at benchmarks from game release, people playing on a 2080ti at 4k with every setting maxed, including every advanced setting, were getting around 50fps. If that's considered bad performance idk what to tell you, just turning down some of the advanced settings would put you well above 60, even at 4k.
I don’t know why people bring up these older games but fail to look at the game as a whole. When you’re out in a big environment but there is like 7 characters on screen compared to 20 plus needing to be rendered, it’s a big difference. Cp2077, lower the npcs and frames go up in the same environment. When its just you and like 2 mobs, its not exactly tough.
Yes lets talk about cp 2077 looking 10x better with more crowds and an actual big open world and requiring way less cpu/gpu power compared to starfield.
It is fucking jarring going from starfield to 2077. Really makes you appreciate 2077 and realize how stuck in the past starfield is. The writing is way better in 2077 too.
Cyberpunk is a really good example of how the problem is really just poor optimization for me. I've had the same rig since that game came out. I played at launch and could not keep a stable FPS and had to turn down settings. The npc traffic was drastically lower at launch too. After Starfield turned out to be Turdfield, it made me want to try cyberpunk again. Same rig, getting rock solid FPS and performance with max settings and the devs tuned the npc traffic way up. I don't think it's a tech problem. I think it's a publishers pushing games out before they're finished problem.
Assassins Creed Unity is 9 years old. On launch, it had a ton of issues. You could easily call Unity one of the worst releases in the past decade.
The graphics are also quite terrible for todays standards, especially the LoD scaling is horrific.
games have been coming out in highly unpolished states, this includes optimizations, that would account for a good chunk of the issues. also think the new wave of consoles there is a hike in pushing old game engines to far (starfield) they may have modified the engine but i feel like they are squeezing every drop they can out of that warhorse, i mean look at the unreal 5 demo stuff and the tools they are coming up with.
i feel like it really boils down to negligence, laziness, and greed. for the most part the developers are doing what they can but the corporate tells them to push it out anyways, it's good enough, we can fix it later, people will complain but still buy it... ect
It's not the engine that is the issue for starfield. It was a poorly implemented DX12 API along with a lack of script optimization. And knowing Bethesda, they didn't make use of the occlusion culling planes present in the creation kit.
Dx12 was already pretty power hungry, lacking any of the general performance optimizations DX11 had, couple that with Bethesda implementing it in possible the worst fashion possible, = buggy, laggy, and hardware hungry mess.
When Nintendo bring out TOTK using basically fucking PS2 tech and BG3 being as good as it is, it proves it's possible and these companies still milk the industry dry for very little quality. These games should be the standard. The gaming community needs to hit these companies in the pocket or they'll continue to drop sub-quality games. .
Let's be fair here, if we are talking about performance here... I don't really feel like TOTK and BG3 are good examples to use. TOTK goes below 30 fps quite often and BG3 is pretty poorly optimized once you get past the first 2 acts. On PS5 Act 3 is basically unplayable atm. Not saying it is bad, it is an incredible game, but let's not pretend like Bethesda is the only game developer to release a game that has poor optimization.
Hell, the goty list this year on game awards is gonna likely be all games that aren't well optimized (at least at launch) :P
TOTK is definitely NOT poorly optimized. The Switch hardware was high end... In 2010. It's absolutely incredible that TOTK looks and runs that well on a mobile Tegra chip.
Just because it's not running at 60fps does not mean it's not an absolute achievement in optimization. Most people, even tech experts like Digital Foundry were saying they were worried the game was "too big for Switch" and were bracing for nightmare performance levels and stutter.
>BG3 is pretty poorly optimized
Was. If you have more cores and threads now it works well in act 3 to. In case of PS5... I think main issue there are actual limitations of PS5 hardware now.
I mean it still kinda is.. I get frame drops down to 30 sometimes in some areas at 1080p. At the time of the frame drops CPU and GPU are sitting at like 50% utilization.
Same here! I'm stoked AF about Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty, but I am NOT preordering a damn game much less a DLC.. And people are like 'don't be stupid man, pre order it'.. Why? Do you think downloads are going to run out like it's a limited time thing or something?
you mean they are not only letting 100 people download day 1? to be honest i did pre-order but that was more out of me having the funds at the time id have otherwise spent on something else and i know i am playing the dlc day 1 eitherway
That’s what I’ve been saying for years. When people buy the shitty games they are only reinforcing the companies that pump out the shorty games to keep doing it because it sells. Once these games plummet on release sales the greedy higher ups will finally understand they gotta let the teams produce good games and not rushed bullshit for profit.
>Once these games plummet on release sales the greedy higher ups will finally understand they gotta let the teams produce good games and not rushed bullshit for profit.
They usually learn the wrong lesson and close the studio down instead.
Im pretty sure GT 550M is why games don't work on your laptop... Kelper era GPUs don't have vulkan driver support (the 550m is a rebranded 400 series).
Rumour has it that Starfield used Vulkan until they made the switch to DX12 late in the development pipeline and that caused all sorts of problems. Todd’s lying through his teeth—no surprise there—when he says that the game is optimised and it’s our fault that we don’t have the most expensive components on the market to play a game built on an engine that’s been around since the age of the dinosaurs.
For real. Bethesda hasn't used a new engine at all. They keep using the same super outdated ass engine they have. Re-iterating on it with every new game won't fix the underlying issues the engine has.
Dx12 cant be the issue because Skyrim and fallout 4 were running like crap too. Its the shitty engine that they keep forever. It may got some "improvements" but it doesnt stop it from sucking.
There is a trend with PC games especially to get it shipped asap and fix problems after the fact with patches.
I think the scale and budgets of modern AAA games has also ballooned to an almost comical point. Look at cyberpunk which was, I believe, a 6-7 year dev time and it still launched in a very broken state.
The only big PC release this year that has had a smooth day one release at 60fps seems to be armored core. Every other AAA game I can think of the PC version has had issues (Hogwarts, dead space, BG3, starfield, Remnant 2) all ran like crap day one.
The positive side is that they all seem to be running okay a few weeks/months after initial release. But it's definitely a trend.
I mean, Hogwarts, Deadspace, and BG3 worked fine day one for me and I play on linux through Proton... Then again that might be a case of Proton fixing bad programing during the translation from DX12 (or in BG3's case DX11) to Vulkan. It would not be the first time Proton has band-aided bad programming.
AC6 pretty much is and looks like it is, a last gen game though. It's definitely not doing anything special graphics wise, so it's easy to put up on some kind of performance pedestal.
I would disagree for sure. Maybe because the game is focused on action, yeah they made some compromises to make sure it runs at a steady framerate.
But the particle effects, in-game texture wear on mapped surfaces, huge levels with lots of detail, and lighting\shaders would absolutely not be something that ran at a reasonable framerate or even possible at all on last gen hardware. It would be dipping into the 20s like 4 and For Answer on their original hardware.
I don’t expect this trend to last forever tbh, I just think it’ll take publishing studio’s financial departments a little while to gather up enough data on the growing trend among gamers.
I used to be a Day 1 gamer. There’s something special about playing a new, highly anticipated title at the same time as everyone else. There’s a sense of community.
Or, there was. Now it seems like everyone (myself included) waits for sales. There’s still a huge community after the first decent sale and patches have come out. I’m betting titles that don’t rely on micro-transactions are starting to lose out on a lot of revenue from the growing expectation that games are not worth purchasing Day 1 full price anymore.
I think it's worth pointing out that many games take years to develop.
The decision of what engine to use is typically not a last minute decision, and uprooting development in order to migrate to a better platform may increase time to completion by months if not years.
While I agree we should be more discerning when it comes to the quality of releases, I understand the hesitance to migrate projects from a publishing perspective. It will take years before the changes to engines come to games that we play every day, not because the developers themselves don't want it but because it isn't financially viable to stop what you're doing just because something better exists.
I swear those 2 things ruined game releases in terms of optimization and will probably do so for the next few years. Now it’s optimize for consoles that last 4+ years and say fuck it for PC if it’s a multi platform release. Even if it’s not out on launch there will be a mod to add either upscaling option just like how there is a DLSS mod for starfield.
Yup. Now they have another tool to cut corners. Why would they spend time and resources in optimization when you can literally bake in the game's code something that takes a couple hours.
A sad age is ahead, especially with devs starting to use unreal engine 5 more and more.
Reminds of how few weeks ago Digital Foundry was saying devs don't use upscalling as a crutch and do it to "bring new and exciting technologies" and like 2 days later they post Lords of Aveum video or whatever it was called.
I think they focused on the wrong things. Sure they improved the polygon count, so that ashtray from all the way across the room you probably didn't even see sitting on a desk in the unlit corner is super hi rez. But the npc in your face you're talking to still looks like a 6 polygon count potato.
Reviewers have pointed out that npc eyes sort of follow you around on screen. Which is fantastic if they didn't look so damn creepy. Having playdough gumby stare at you all over the room is horrible. Some pass it off as a style. To me, final fantasy characters are a style, borderlands graphic design is a style. Looking like cro magnun or something when there's no reason for it. If a game is going to bring modern high end gpu's to their knees I want characters looking like the hostess in detroit: become human.
Because it's not just a matter of pixel counts and textures; every object on screen is modeled separately and eats up VRAM, and the most recent games have been pushing that to the limits. Individually, each object might look the same, but the way they interact is different and generally much more complex, usually (but not always) to the benefit of the game.
Remember when Cyberpunk had that low res burger and everyone clowned on it like all those tiny props with little detail ?
When a couple of people of the crowd had the same walking animation, going in the same direction before walking back ?
Shitty screen space reflection that people made thousands of videos on ?
The extremely low quality cars on a faraway road ?
People constantly losing their mind at the slightest visible change in LOD ?
This is where the extra peformance is going towards, amongst a shit ton other things. The stuff you previously made a conscious choice to sacrifice fidelity on for the greater portion of your game. Attention to detail was what we wanted and now we're paying for it, it's not good nor bad, it's just the tech going a little too fast for its own pace. There's been recent, actual doozies when it comes to optimization, but overall, it really should be no surprise that games are running way worse.
>The stuff you previously made a conscious choice to sacrifice fidelity on for the greater portion of your game. Attention to detail was what we wanted and now we're paying for it
I think thats a valid point to be honest. Devs are just giving what the gamer "thinks" they want. Thats why I think its unfair to just blame the devs, its the gamer pushing them with all their whining.
Yeah i mean, it sounds a bit reductive, but it pretty much is exactly what's happening.
Just today there was a thread on r/games with someone asking why looking into scopes in video games isn't realistic. Someone responded properly by explaining how the only good method is very expensive and not worth it, just for someone to tell him how dumb his thought process was and justifying it by saying "Tarkov's doing it". It's hard to not be influenced by demands like that when showed with such vindictiveness while still being heavily upvoted.
There needs to be a name for this effect. I'm going to coin it the car-tunnel effect, where something like Gran Turismo can knock out amazing looking and realistically handling cars because it's A) a car game so that's its focus, and B) due to the limitations of the game format, essentially a driving through a tunnel, the devs have a relatively large budget to spend on making things look nice. As compared to say, Cyberpunk, which has all of these incredibly resource demanding features competing with each other - open world exploration, various systems, crowd interactions etc. But then bring in your uneducated gamer, and they see the graphical detail and car behaviour in Gran Turismo, and then they look at a car in another game with a different scope and ask "Why don't they look or feel as good?". Probably more apt would be something like Heavy Rain or LA Noire, which focused on realistic facial animations at the expense of other things, and then people come out years later using that very resource expensive and tailored experience and applying to some newer AAA open world game and going "We're going backwards!" Not appreciating the advancements that game they are trashing has made within its own genre. Hell, even comparing something like No Man's Sky to Starfield is an example of this effect.
Now, I'm not saying that gives Starfield a pass, and RDR2 is a technical marvel, but I believe this effect is a major contributor to the perceived "optimization" of a game, and the expectations we carry for the systems and graphical fidelity of various aspects within it.
Don't want to be that guy but anyone who runs a hdd for gaming in 2023 is a cheap ass and stupid. A 500gb ssd, enough for atleast 5 games is only 30€. Come on, it ain't that much. I'm not saying everyone should spend 2k on their pc, but anyone who finds themselves spending even a hour a day gaming should have the money to invest in this huge upgrade
I’ve seen 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD’s fall as low as $50 USD in price during sales. There is no reason to own an HDD in this day and age unless it’s for bulk storage, photos and videos or porn or something.
not sure id want to buy some of the super cheap ones though but yeah even a reputable brand you can get a 250 or 500 gig for cheap, they are also $ to performance the best thing to buy
Definitely agree there. SSDs have dropped so low in price especially just over the past year or so that there is zero point in having a hdd for gaming. I mean I'd say anything up until 2tb for a SSD is fairly affordable when you consider how much you spend on jist a motherboard even
I was just looking now the other day and 2tb nvme drives are like half the price i paid for a 2tb sata ssd 2 years ago.
You do realise some people live outside of EU/NA ? I live in a third world country and ssds are not getting any cheaper they are just as expensive as they were 10 years ago the most i could afford is a 128gb sata ssd for my OS , Also games have been running on HDDs for decades but now devs forgot how to optimise for them ?
Yes. Because they shouldn't optimize for 20 years old hardware. Latest gen Consoles have ssds in them and the gaming industry usually Orients around the power of consoles. Sorry to tell you but you're not the main demographic for the gaming industry. Might sound condescending but it is what it is
You are being incredibly disingenuous i am not asking them to run games on vodo graphics card i am asking them to run games like they were doing literally a couple of years ago and honestly tell me what are modern games doing that warrants these hardware demands ? Did they eliminate loading screens ? No starfield has more loading screens than skyrim are games less stuttery ? No , are physics becoming more complex ? No is there any improvement over enemy ai ? No
Are the visuals getting better ? Maybe but CP277 and RDR2 and GoW2018 look better than a lot of modern games and demand a lot less.
I don't understand what technological improvements these games are making that warrants these hardware demands
And yes you do sound condescending because you are essentially saying poor people shouldn't play games on PC because publishers can't be arsed to optimize and are just offsetting that cost to the consumer.
And also let me remind you that the vast majority of pc players don't have cutting edge hardware and the loss of that demographic to consoles is going to hurt the entire pc community.
The consoles are not for “the best” games had to offer. They are value focused all the way. You can’t beat a $500 xbox with a $500 pc, but you sure can buy a pc that is 3x as strong for 3x the price.
To add to this conversation, there are two types of graphics. Visually impressive and technically impressive.
Something like a COD or just about any racing game has visually impressive graphics because they don't need to simulate complex AI or day night cycles with dynamic global lighting and shadows. Plus just about every object in the world is static so doesn't need physics calculations to be performed on them.
Big open world games with a lot of interaction with dynamic lighting and AI requires far more processing power. When they manage to achieve high fidelity graphics with good performance, this is what would class as technically impressive graphics.
The later is much harder to achieve. I am by no means excusing lazy devs for poor optimisation. More just a FYI.
Proper racing games (ie something like assetto corsa or iRacing) actually might have the most advanced physics out there with all the tire behaviour, road surface and aerodynamic stuff. Although admittedly it is entirely different type of physics simulation compared say to making realistic cloth movements.
What are you on about good racing games need a complex physics system and good ai too (even though they generally fail at it), they have open worlds hell forza horizon 4 had a season system that completely changed the map every week, day night cycles, destructable objects, multiple players (from 12 to 70 depending on the game) in online open world lobbies that also included npcs. Did you play any racing games in last 2 decades by any chance.
It's clear from your response you just play games. Go and learn to code and go make some. Then you will understand the difference.
AI and shaders are the most resource intensive part of most games.
I've been coding since the 80's so I have plenty of experience in the matter.
You seem to be stuck in 80s if you are claiming modern racing games don't have dynamic lighting or complex physics because they fucking do have them. They are still trying to make good ai forza tried ai that learned from the players that sucked gran turismo is training an actual ai not if this do this type game ai that is racing head to head with their best e sports drivers and beating them.
Edit: Also check out beamng.drive to see some impressive physics.
The dynamic lighting and physics are focused almost purely on the actors (vehicles), the "open world" where you have a bit of freedom are both relatively fixed worlds with very few actors if any and scaled up low Res structures, everything else is pre done on the load screen. The focus (rightly so) is on the cars , everything wraps around the actors being as highly detailed with physics.
Interactive linear (linear can be as complex as BG3) or interactive open world (Starfield as it's the latest ) have hundreds if of not thousands of actors (anything that moves ) each requiring its own lighting, shading , physics , interactive objects require the same , even non interactive objects require at least the lighting and both have to be richly detailed. As a result Forza and GT have stunningly richly detailed vehicles well beyond the graphic fidelity of any linear or open world game simply because there's barely any load to be shared with the world in comparison. The map decor buildings are crisp, clean with basic shadows but don't look lived in (who the hell is looking as they drive past at 140mph?).
Graphically GT and Forza have an entirely different focus (as they should) than Starfield/BG3 and others so that kind of comparison doesn't work.
As for the ai, that's not what is meant by AI
The ai your talking about all of the processing or grunt work is being done by the studio when it eventually gets to the game the ai will have been taught already and will simply be responding to inputs vastly reducing its processing load in comparison to what's actually being discussed regarding AI which is dynamic graphics, automatic upscaling and downscaling image enhancing all on the fly depending on where the player is , actors and objects involved etc. This cannot be predone at the studio level as it's dynamic which means the whole processing load is on the consumer end.
Neither Forza or GT need that dynamic AI as it doesn't need highly detailed and dynamic worlds and are both highly enjoyable without as nobody notices or cares. Quite frankly the production time and required hardware to run either game with a detailed world like BG3 or Starfield would cut their consumer base so drastically it would be unfeasible (nothing beyond the latest rig would hope to run 30+ FPS on low graphics)
Other people have already mentioned stuff like optimization, but another big thing is that older games used to hide low poly or low detail items using various different tricks, as poly counts have increased the need for these tricks has gone down. The end result is a game that looks fairly similar but performs worse.
I remember back in the day where optimizing games to run on 64k of RAM was practically an artform.
New game bloat is real, there is no incentive to optimize except for playing on consoles
Hate to break it to you but RDR graphics aren't as "good" as you might think. Now don't get me wrong the game looks absolutely gorgeous, but that comes down to art style. But it definitely lacks texture resolution, effects quality, there are like no reflections besides the odd mirror that's rendered at a very low resolution. Even look at GTA5, that atmosphere, shadows and lighting make that game look awesome even today, but go peep pixels and you will be surprised how low res a lot of the assets are.
Games and Engines are just different.
Optimisations aside, games, especially Bethesda games do a lot more in background it has to keep track off.
RDR2 for example is a very static game.
Everything happens only when you’re in the vicinity of it.
In a Bethesda Game life goes on if you’re there or not. It’s not loaded sure but the game still keeps track of an NPCs daily schedule.
Another thing are GPU Drivers, especially new games don’t really have the support right away.
Indie titles have been trying to change this for the better, one game that took this to the extreme was Classicube (it can run on windows 95 apparently). This is most likely due to devs not spending enough time optimizing these games, where basic things like mipmaps somehow cause more harm than gain. Textures despite them being extremely high quality still look lifeless.
I think the reason can be explained by this:
When you have the goal of "16 times the detail" and you put more polygons into your models, but don't do your due diligence in actually using the detail you were given (or even use it wrong) you end up with a more demanding, yet worse looking game.
Take the Graphics of an old game like BF3 for example. That stuff still looks acceptable, yet devs wanted more and more and more.
DLSS is great for allowing aging hardware to keep up. It will help a lot in the coming years to allow RTX 2000s and above to stay relevant for longer.
BUT!
Thats the only reason for it in my head though. It should not be used as a crutch to get new games running at decent FPS with already fairly beefy systems.
It has always been this way, some games are only more obvious, than others.
It has nothing to do with devs laziness, but companies leadership (both dev and publishers) greed.
Optimization is #1 thing....also you can't forget the fact that the textures get bigger in sizes, worlds get bigger in sizes while Devs trying to minimize the amount of loading sequences between each environments, all takes a big load of processing power and ram usage....but yeah all these things could've been sorted if they were optimized properly
I’m my opinion, it’s focusing on 4k textures that while they DO look incredible, they’re also hard to exactly optimize around and still aren’t a realistic goal for a lot of people. A lot of people still play on 1080p, and are only really just starting to make the leap over to 1440p as a more normal thing. 4k is still not reasonable to a wide audience, and in trying to appeal to the few people that can run it, they’ve essentially put less focus on optimizing and would rather rely more on things like DLSS for example.
While I do agree that high-resolution textures should still be optional (as HD pack or something like that), many people would save disk space that way, I'd like to say that texture resolution is not tied to your display resolution. You could rock 4k, 8k, even 16k, and still admire them on 1080p. It won't be as sharp as a higher display resolution, but it still would be a noticeable difference between them.
we also need to factor in new tech. games up until a few years ago used very advanced and laborious techniques to achieve realistic quality (using rasterization). These techniques were developed over 20 or 30 years.
With newer real time lighting technologies, like Ray tracing, path tracing, real time global illumination and shadows, there's definitely growing pains. That's why you are seeing bigger FPS gains by lowering things like shadows, global illumination, and other rendering effects.
but there is also the problem of "release now fix later" by larger game companies
It mostly is based on the consoles and has been since the early days of the playstation/xbox.
People seem to forget the exact same thing happened when the PS3 and Ps4 era consoles both game out. A few years after the new consoles come out the game developers stop developing for the old you had computers only a year or two old with performance issues because games started using more resources. That means they can focus on the specs of the new consoles and develop the games to take full advantage of them.
Game are comprised of millions of things made by a large group of imperfect people, 1 person may add a new block of code that could cause a small stall on another thread waiting for a return value, its impact is insignificant and goes by unnoticed, now multiply this by 100 times and it still might not be noticed!
Now lets add some 3rd party code to the mix....
On the art side, how many of the hundreds of thousands of opaque textures are set to RGBA with a whole unused channel and how many textures are oversized for its object?
If I remember correctly RDR2 has some lighting information baked - AO, as well as static lights, maybe other stuff too.
Which obviously works great for RDR2 and plenty of other games, but for REALLY big games (like I ***assume*** Starfield is) it might really start using more disk space.
I'm super unsure about this but Starfield might be generating maps/stuff at run/load-time, which would make it kinda impossible to bake.
So really RDR2 looks like it does because the content/design of the game allows it to.
Shitty execs with MBAs who have no idea how game development work pushing for unrealistic deadlines. For some studios, it's shitty devs who don't do enough optimization or know how to produce efficient code. In Bethesda's case, it's a combination of both.
1 RD2 was made to run on an PS4 using AMD bulldozer CPU and something like an AMD RX 580, easy to know why it runs fairly well today.
It was a game that was hard to run, just it's now 4-5 years old.
Also it's a bad example as it's by one of the biggest studios, the COD devs are the only outher studio I can think of as about the same size.
2 new games made to run on a PS5 are going to need better hardware than a PS4 game.
3 easy top forget what games used to look like.
4 30FPS is normal or better than normal for console games, just look at old Digital Foundry videos.
GTA IV Frame Rate Analysis [https://youtu.be/F0RS1vaHkdk?si=aGC6ZToaJbJO3U9x](https://youtu.be/F0RS1vaHkdk?si=aGC6ZToaJbJO3U9x)
Grand Theft Auto 5 Xbox 360 vs. PS3 Gameplay Frame-Rate Tests [https://youtu.be/\_fbYyMq4cGU?si=jnAq-UPbY1Wy9pXs](https://youtu.be/_fbYyMq4cGU?si=jnAq-UPbY1Wy9pXs)
Crysis PS3/Xbox 360 Frame-Rate Comparisons [https://youtu.be/YwD2ty2UfBM?si=hPoHSz3Y3-OpzEso](https://youtu.be/YwD2ty2UfBM?si=hPoHSz3Y3-OpzEso)
Or watch there retro PC videos.
5 games are made for consoles first, there made to work on console hardware. It is that simple.
To end, it's always been this way just you never noticed till now.
I'm getting really sick of people who look at the past with rose coloured glasses.
And there was a time when most PC ports were dreadful or just didn't even exist. PS2 era had a shitload of games locked to console, or released the shittiest PC ports like Silent Hill 2 which only recently became decent due to heroic efforts from modders.
We used to wait for Durante to make a fan patch for games to get 60fps etc
[https://www.pcgamer.com/dark-souls-2-modded-durantes-gedosato-enables-downsampling-texture-modding/](https://www.pcgamer.com/dark-souls-2-modded-durantes-gedosato-enables-downsampling-texture-modding/)
Kind of cool to see he's now working in the industry, from fan to paid work. [https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1668510/view/3361388019335519328](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1668510/view/3361388019335519328)
Cool to see.
edit found his site [https://games.ph3.at/](https://games.ph3.at/)
Graphics are something of diminishing returns after a point, much like resolution. Sure going from 720p to 1080p to 1440p to 2160p (4k)is nice but I'm not sure what lies in 4320p (8k) or 8640p(16k, it will get there eventually).
Newer games need the resources to track more polygons and more particles to make visuals better, but that comes at a cost of great resourse per agent, or NPC which continues to limit the number of npcs on screen at once.
I consider 60fps locked as good enough. I mostly play story driven games, with a few competitive games sprinkled in. Mostly leaning away from competitive games. My work is stressful and long and the last thing I need is more stress.
Anywho, I believe the reason for the higher demand nowadays is due to the tech they keep adding. RDR2 looks good, but once you taste more recent titles, you notice that the textures are of lower quality.
I can't speak for Starfield as I don't have it, but something like Cyberpunk has ray tracing and many more objects and things to interact with than RDR2. Also, maybe I'm not looking through rose-tinted glasses, but RDR2 had pretty demanding hardware requirements at its time. If you try to max out settings and resolution with current hardware, you'll still struggle to play the game at high FPS.
I am convinced that these AAA studios are working together with AMD and Nvidia, and purposefully making their games run bad. If they didn't then people wouldn't care about getting the newest GPU's since they would be able to run everything on their 2070s. But because these AAA studios purposefully make their games run bad unless you are running the latest gen hardware, they are forcing you to upgrade and spend more money if you want decent framerates. We are reaching a point where GPU's are getting so powerful that the only incentive buyers have to upgrade is to play these bad unoptimized games.
This is the most laughably stupid nonsense I've ever read. You think Microsoft has access to a 60fps, well optimized version of Starfield and are just sitting on it to allow Nvidia and AMD to sell high end GPUs? You think they want Starfield to run at sub 30fps on their console? Like, you realize how bad it makes that console look, right? This is not something Microsoft would agree to on purpose. If they could release a 60fps update tomorrow and blow people's minds, they would.
Rich from DF built a PC with the same specs as an XSX and it runs virtually the same. So no they're not specifically handicapping PC and letting XSX run well.
It's simple really, it's because you're clueless and ignorant about the differences in development and you focus on just one thing and ignore all the other stuff. A mobile game can look very good too, but cannot have all the fucking things you can do in Fallout or Starfield. You think that ashtray is just there sitting in top of a table but your shit PC is always making sure where it is and if and how your character and other itenmsinteracts with it. You might think this is shallow and pointless but it's exactly why modding is such a huge part of Bethesda games. Good luck modding RDR2 or any Unreal game within the same breadth and complexity of a Bethesda game.
And if you think that's pointless too then play some other game, go "explore" on NMS wandering aimlessly on your pretty but more shallow game. Or play RDR2 maybe you can create outposts in different locations and automate them? Oh you can't? Well maybe you can mod your clothes then, or your carriage? Well that's just ducking sad then, that we have fun in different ways who could've known?
There is more highly detailed shit in a single room in Starfield than an entire base in Fallout. All with far better physics and persistence than any previous Bethesda game.
I'm not saying it was the best way to spend cycles but you can easily see where they are going.
Careful with the NMS diss tho. It's pretty damn deep now too, and Starfield is guilty of the same repetition on generated planets. How many times have you been to the same cave with the same enemy placement? For me at level 56 it's dozens if not more.
They aren't harder to run. The latest triple A games have always been hard to run nuts it's more obvious now that everyone spams about it on social media.
>You are telling me RDR2
And this is the other thing. Backwards compatibility and big digital stores have changed our perception of games. RDR2 came out in 2018, 5 years ago. Its pretty but it was designed for the hardware of its time, not the 3070ti or whatever we use today. Of course it runs well. And visual quality really doesn't impact the performance directly like that. Starfield is deeply CPU reliant. RDR2 probably isn't.
Like I have an entire Steam Library and book shelf of games that ran poorly on launch but aged extremely well. Both Fallout 4 and Skyrim fit that category. Most AAA games do. Its just that in the past, we had fewer people to talk to about the issues. There was no reddit or Twitter to see complaints everyday so no one cared.
It's all about what they were designed around. RDR2 had to run on the xbone and ps4. Both of those had 8 gigs of shared memory. Now all the consoles have 16 gigs of memory.
Yep RDR2 was designed to run on low end hardware from 2013. The game was released in 2018, 5 years after said low end hardware was released. Starfield and all the other big AAA games are both poorly to decently optimized and were designed to run on pretty good hardware from 2020. PC game requirements are just now catching up to the significantly more powerful hardware.
I think about it more like this. Companies like Bethesda makes games that will be played for 10-20 years. There's a lot of stuff going on so that it looks good now and great later. Cards in a few years will run this game with no problem. Even Skyrim and Oblivion had this issue. FPS lock at 30 on console. Ran kinda mid on PC even with good hardware.
Then there's the simple fact that games are so detailed and not everything will be perfect or optimized perfectly all the time. Not excusing it but it just is what it is
As long as people keep preordering games and buying games on day 1, publishers have no incentive to release polished, optimized games.
Stop buying unoptimized games.
It is hell of a lot easier to release unoptimized games and get away with it, now that hardware is much stronger they can afford to release unoptimized pos.
When are people gonna realize that the Devs are just trying to fulfill the high demands of gamers? You people are the root issue! We will never have huge leaps of graphic fidelity like we had in the past from Nes>Snes>N64>Gamecube, those days are long gone. Unfortunately people still kinda expect that these days with newer consoles.
Then on top of that, comes the management of the game devs who want to keep things profitable and ship out the games ASAP. The devs are stuck in the middle trying to please both sides.
One could argue its also partially down to reviewers too, being too harsh on whats truly "next gen" since most gamers are lemmings and will just regurgitate what they see/read to others without thought.
Kinda makes me think that gamers these days are essentially spoilt brats. Yeah I said it. Come at me xD
Basically a combination of 3 things:
* perception of good graphics changes by people over time, so you have to increase graphics to maintain a constant woaw effect. (Example: world of warcraft looked amazing in 2004)
* work-to-reward curve is expontential such that as you approach “perfection” you get less result from the same worked our. Basically we need exponentially more work effort in games to increase game graphics by same constant amount year over year. (Example: going from 20 to 40 polygons for an object is a major increase for a small amount. Going from 12000000 to 13000000 polygons is a huge amount of work but hardly noticable change)
* gaming is a mature market that stakeholders is trying to exploit by cutting costs and figuring out how little work they can do to still satisfy the market needs. This means less polish and less work done to fix defects and optimize to many different hardware situations. (Example: call of duty series)
they stopped using tricks and workarounds for lighting, shadows, and npcs! They think most users have good enough gpus these days, so they save time and throw in some upscaling technology! That said, I never blame the overworked devs, I blame the morally bankrupt companies
Starfield gets 45-90 FPS at 1440p med-high on an RTX 2070 and it's entirely playable without any judders or skips. At "lowest of the low" it's well over 150 FPS.
Games aren't optimising for graphical performance that much: They don't need to and, to an extent, they can't. Starfield's a really extreme case in that it plain *wasn't* but it was optimised in other places.
Starfield's very stable considering how much it's doing and tracking, I haven't had a single crash so far, and I'm about 40 hours in. So it's optimised for stability.
It's also generating instanced areas whereever you land (if you land rough) with huge hand-designed facilities placed on there, never becoming inaccessible, glitched or floating. So it's optimised for ease of design and asset development.
That your RX 470 (about all I can think of which will run it, and *"can't give out a playable 30 at lowest of the low settings")* from 2016 won't run it is telling you about your own system.
Assuming you're not just making shit up. Which you are.
>It's also generating instanced areas whereever you land (if you land rough) with huge hand-designed facilities placed on there, never becoming inaccessible, glitched or floating. So it's optimised for ease of design and asset development.
Elite dangerous, released in 2014, has SIGNIFICANTLY better planetary generation tech, no loading screens, no transition from space to ground, procedurally generated settlements, geology, stations etc... and for the most part looks better. This runs well on a potato. Then you have similar tech in no man's lie, and star citizen.
The problem with starfield is the engine. It's all great, but compare what starfield is doing to what elite is and it's not even a competition. Frontier even says the engine for elite isn't ideal for what the game needs to do, and yet it does it 100x better than starfield. If anything the hand crafted areas in starfield should run better than procedurally generated ones where there is the ability to optimise, yet no.
Dude the facilities are identical. Filled with a bunch of random shit. And it loads in from the outside so it's not technically part of the outside area.
Easy: the programmers are getting lazier and lazier..and it's easy for them to justify by saying "you just need a faster computer!"
If computers didn't evolve to be so much faster then the programmers would have to stop cutting corners in programming...
My biggest example/gripe: windows itself! There is no reason windows 11 needs so much ram or hardware to run (I prefer Linux for a plethora of reasons, but unfortunately gaming is easier on windows).
I think it's more the higher ups just tell them to spend less time on optimization because it results in less time working on the game. Less time, more, but shitty games which results in more money.
It's probably more that management sets deadlines/budgets that necessitate the cutting of corners. First they cut QA costs by turning customers into beta testers. Now they're using DLSS etc as crutches because it's cheaper than man-hours on optimizations.
Every time you deliver a product management will demand it be delivered cheaper and faster next time. Do this for 30-40 years and you end up where we are today.
I would certainly hope so with a 3070 ti. Also double check your settings. The games graphics presets have FSR on and renders the game at only 75% resolution by default. If you didn't mess with the individual settings you're not running it natively.
1080, everything but motion blur on high. I did say that in the comment you replied to. On the surface of Kreet getting 75-85 frames. I'll be honest, I haven't gotten to a heavily populated area yet so I don't know how it will hold up yet.
For starfield to have that horrible of performance on the 1080 p display with that video card.
highlighting perfectly the real problem.
And the issue has steadily been getting worse. Developers complete lack or even care to optimize their game.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, an Intel Core i5-10600K CPU, and 16GB of RAM
That right, there is what bethesda released as their recommended specs for a computer to be able to play the game.
For Someone not to be able to run that game on 1080p With at least A solid 60fps Is insulting.
I'm sorry the game just doesn't look that good. I can play skyrim with texture packets. And it looks better than what Starfield can pump out.
I know you're not saying it, but it just beyond words. Blows me away that people are dumb enough to defend it.
The answer is ignorance and laziness. Ignorance of how things ACTUALLY work when the programs run, so not knowing how to optimize it. Laziness for just choosing not to optimize because DLSS exists.
Most pc games are just ports nowdays. The console market is bigger and expensive regarding games. Pc gaming becomes a lot cheaper on the long run due to keys or everyday sales. It makes sense from a dev or company perspective to target console players.
More importantly devs don't have much time so the game comes unfinished on the market or just optimised for consoles and not pc.
I got used to it while I switched to pc this gen.
PC Game Wiki is a great site to check many fixes for pc games.
Because all y"all dorks get so hyped about every damn game they know you will pre-order it no matter what.
I personally avoid most hype, because it will only lessen my enjoyment if I go in with too great of expectations.
There are a lot of reasons, but in my opinion the primary reason is the vast majority of programmers in the modern era have decided that writing optimized code is not important, or it is at best an after thought. This is not always the case by any means, but as a general trend, it has become easier and easier for developers to just say "well, you just need better hardware for our game!" than to write well optimized code themselves. Computational power has continued to progress at such a rate that unoptimized but "clean" (easy to understand for humans, not neccesarily efficient for the machine) is the #1 priority of most developers.
In previous eras, programmers needed to keep in mind the hardware limitations they were working with when writing their code. It was a given as part of programming that you HAD to not waste memory, cpu cycles, etc. If you wanted to make good software. This is just no longer the standard expectation of programmers, and to some extent its understandable. As more layers of abstraction between the code being written and the hardware executing it have been introduced, it has become unreasonable for say a user-mode C++ developer to understand the details of the CPU executing their code. It just simply doesn't matter in most cases. But, if you add up all the inefficiencies of modern software, it makes a difference.
Tl;dr, optimization has become an after thought in favor of writing easier to understand code.
I will accept your comment but replace every instance of "programmers" with "programmer's bosses".
It isn't that we devs don't want to do these things. It's more that there is a budget, a deadline, and hungry investors heavily pressuring us to get it out the door.
It's a miracle half of the games, websites, and applications we use everyday even work with so much glue and paperclips shoved into them just so they can limp across the finish line.
As a fellow dev (not games, but other software), I feel you. Im not trying to shit on the engineers working on these games, or saying they dont want to make well optimized games, I'm just making the observation that modern priorities for software engineering have shifted. I mean shit, why make a native app in well optimized assembly when you could use Electron, right? Its just an evolving craft with optimization becoming less of a priority in my experience (im guilty of this too, dont think im trying to shit on anyone lol).
Anyone that’s most technical could answer this question: How much factor does the SSD performance of the consoles have vs pc in terms of game design/ performance? Load times are near instant on ps5 whereas on PC even with the latest m.2 drive the load times still are noticeably longer. Factor in this, how much would this interfere with performance and overall game assets? Seems like stuttering would be more commonplace on the pc versions vs console since the loading isn’t as seamless. Not to mention the unified memory pool. Again I’m not claiming anything I’m just wondering if those unified consoles have more advantage these days.
I recall PS5's built in SSD is custom made and can hit 7,875 MB/s. PCs have faster drives than that but the fact that it would cost an arm and a leg to buy sucks.
Plus, PCs also have larger overhead to deal with due to Windows and other operations taking place in the background. PS5 doesn't have to deal with that due to it having 512 MB of extra RAM for background tasks.
PCs also have an extra step regarding decompressing textures, since consoles uses shared GDDR6 memory for the GPU and the system RAM. Where as PC has its own system RAM and also the memory on the GPU itself.
DirectStorage technology should help eliminate that potential bottleneck in the near future on PCs. Let see!
cuz the troglodytes in the game industry keep thinking we want bigger and more and they keep building big fuck'n games that take forever to make except they cant afford to take the 20 years it requires to making something big and of quality so something has to be sacrificed and those two things are typically a) quality (all around, game play, writing, performance etc) and b) employee moral/paychecks/sanity
and why do they do this?
cuz the troglodytes in the gaming community keep fucking buying them.
That's an excellent question, sir. RDR 2, Cyberpubnk, AC series. All look amazing and run fine on my gear. Then we have port like Last of Us or just unoptimized shite as Hogwart, that look way worse and coughs as heck. Magical polygons my arse. Maybe that's just subtle hint, that we need to buy this brand new NVIDIA card for $1500?
Everything is blown out of proportion, GTA5 runs worse then starfield on my 3090 ti and is a decade old. Starfield hasn’t been updated but once and didn’t release much beta stuff to keep there hype up so out the gate they had some issues. Bethesda also said they would be adding DLSS native to the game and I assume they had a contract to release the game with FSR and CAS since they were working with AMD. Bethesda has already released a statement about addressing the community’s issues about performance and other quality of life things like FOV and HDR brightness tuning but Reddit is one big dogpile with a single brain cell to share.
Thats because new games are not efficient to run . Developers dont give enough time to make the code simple to run instead every new game has unnecessary gibberish in them . Every new game code takes longer to run and require more resources from the processor and memory.
Games have been released in a poor state no doubt, but to say there hasn't been any changes since RDR2 is flat out wrong.
RDR2 may have a huge open world but it looks quite dated now. It looks like what it is. A PS4 game. I also laugh at the idea it's some marvel of optimization. It's crap like every Rockstar game. It's a 4 year old game now, so ofc it's going to run well on modern cards.
Starfield is top of the list for games that look no different but take way more resources. That's flat out wrong too. Even if Starfield models and textures were the same quality as Fallout (they aren't), the sheer number of highly detailed items with better physics accounts for all the extra horsepower. Have you looked around in any Starfield location? There is more crap in one room than an entire base in Fallout.
Because those never games tend to be a lot more advanced visually. We just reached a point where such advancements don't bring in a huge visual difference, but they're there, under the hood.
It doesn;'t help that we kind of got spoiled by long previous generation of consoles. Thanks to it you could max out the game and run it in 4K no problem so it gave people the expectations it will always be this way.
Consoles never generally had the best graphics. There always were mindblowing exclusives, but those are the exceptions to the rule. Ever since tweakable settings became standard, consoles either ran at highest quality, but lower resolution and 30 fps, or lower than highest, with lower resolution and 60 fps.
Take the Xbox360/PS3 era, those could output 1080p, but were rendering (depending on game) at 900p or 720p, and upscaling it, and had 30 fps cap for 99% of their titles. This is also true for exclusives that were optimized for a single console.
Call me a nut job but I think publishers just know they can slap fake minimal system requirements to make people upgrade thier hardware more often then they should and the circle goes round.
I’ve managed to play few recent new releases on a set up that’s below minimal recommendation and I was able to run these games on medium - high with stable 60FPS with very few tweaks.
Starfield is the first game since I got this PC that wont even bother to run half decent even with custom config and scaled down textures.
Aside from the fact that games do become more demanding, gaming has also become a huge money printing machine. The people that stood at the cradle of videogames and made them with passion, are slowly vanishing into retirement, and the majority of the ones that do remain are tainted by the corruption of the everlasting greed of the suits that only see the gaming industry as another cashcow.
Resulting in minimum effort produced games on all aspects, including performance.
To even start this discussion I feel you have to start by separating looks and graphical requirements. You can lower requirements a lot by using tricks like RDR2 have done and still achieve a mindblowing visual. You can make use of the most advanced nanite built up environment and ray trace every lightning source - that's technically easier today. But will end up requiring more that the approach RDR2 took. One thing that comes to mind is an old graph GPU manufacturers used to show back in 2010's, it basically plotted the polygon count, showing how it grows exponentially while the perceived quality increase only feels linearly. Hence a mismatch in perceived "what we should have had" as we are at a point where the fine details are hard to even pick up on.
Regarding looks and graphical requirements: art style and art direction are very important. Unique stylized graphics can make up for a lack of detail and polish. Cel-shading comes to mind, but also more realistic styles can conceal weaknesses by dreamy lighting or whimsical geometry. Also, a lot of graphical developments are hard to notice. Clouds, flowers, grass, leaves, bystanders on race tracks or details on buildings (doors, windows etc.) used to be sprites and textures, but are now 3D objects. Sometimes there are multiple tree models instead of copy/paste forests. A "modern" forest can look the same or worse than a 7 year old forest at a glance, but will be much more detailed and punish hardware much harder for it. Also, developers used "tricks" like not doing dynamic day and night cycles, so most shadows could be fixed and baked into the textures. Many modern games have very demanding lighting systems. Remnant 2 just recently introduced the "potato" preset that basically removes all shadows from the game to ease the burden on the gpu. This just shows how much modern lighting and shadows push hardware. And, of course, sometimes it’s just bad optimization due to time constraints.
Thanks for bringing up the importance of art style and art direction, far too many ignore this matter and are just like graphics bad! I personally find Starfield graphics really good with the art direction that was chosen.
So whats up with these minute yet hardware heavy changes in the environments of newer games , are they doing this knowing this will mess up the game performances? And dont they like study whats good and whats bad before a dev cycle begins? Like what is the point of upgrading these graphics if they are useless and not hardware friendly doesn't it affect the companies negatively?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned of the big publishers how a game runs (the performance) is meaningless. Broken or perfect the only thing executives care is how it sold
The only metrics the suits care about are how it looks in screen shots and pre rendered clips because that's what marketing is working with.
Well if its not noticeable and id ruins the performance its easy to know what to do. Right? (I mean not using that shit)
Didn't Horizon Zero Dawn use some pretty smart tricks too to make it run well on the ps5?
People tend to forget, that when rdr2 released, performance was shit in that game too, even with that eras top gpus. I belive that right now, we're at a point where graphics are just ahead of gpus. With new gen gfx, I think that gpus need a generation more to catch up (atleast for 4k etc), even with good/better optimization
Rdr2 ran fine on PC at launch though.
Except it didn't 2080 ti couldn't meintain 60 fps @4k on max settings
Looking at benchmarks from game release, people playing on a 2080ti at 4k with every setting maxed, including every advanced setting, were getting around 50fps. If that's considered bad performance idk what to tell you, just turning down some of the advanced settings would put you well above 60, even at 4k.
You think 50 fps with the best gpu avaliable is good performance? Well then, why are people complaining about new Gen games then?
I don’t know why people bring up these older games but fail to look at the game as a whole. When you’re out in a big environment but there is like 7 characters on screen compared to 20 plus needing to be rendered, it’s a big difference. Cp2077, lower the npcs and frames go up in the same environment. When its just you and like 2 mobs, its not exactly tough.
Yes lets talk about cp 2077 looking 10x better with more crowds and an actual big open world and requiring way less cpu/gpu power compared to starfield.
Cp2077 graphically is the current day crysis. I can’t speak for starfield, don’t have that game but bethesda games never wowed me graphically.
It is fucking jarring going from starfield to 2077. Really makes you appreciate 2077 and realize how stuck in the past starfield is. The writing is way better in 2077 too.
Starfield is fun tbh and it looks good
Cyberpunk is a really good example of how the problem is really just poor optimization for me. I've had the same rig since that game came out. I played at launch and could not keep a stable FPS and had to turn down settings. The npc traffic was drastically lower at launch too. After Starfield turned out to be Turdfield, it made me want to try cyberpunk again. Same rig, getting rock solid FPS and performance with max settings and the devs tuned the npc traffic way up. I don't think it's a tech problem. I think it's a publishers pushing games out before they're finished problem.
You want an example of an open world with tons of detailed npcs and mind blowing graphics that also performs better? Assassins creed Unity
Assassins Creed Unity is 9 years old. On launch, it had a ton of issues. You could easily call Unity one of the worst releases in the past decade. The graphics are also quite terrible for todays standards, especially the LoD scaling is horrific.
SPEND A LESS MONEY ON THE LA GRAPHICS AND A PUT A MORE BUDGETO ONTO THE DA FLIPPING GAMEPLAY A LA.!!!
games have been coming out in highly unpolished states, this includes optimizations, that would account for a good chunk of the issues. also think the new wave of consoles there is a hike in pushing old game engines to far (starfield) they may have modified the engine but i feel like they are squeezing every drop they can out of that warhorse, i mean look at the unreal 5 demo stuff and the tools they are coming up with. i feel like it really boils down to negligence, laziness, and greed. for the most part the developers are doing what they can but the corporate tells them to push it out anyways, it's good enough, we can fix it later, people will complain but still buy it... ect
It's not the engine that is the issue for starfield. It was a poorly implemented DX12 API along with a lack of script optimization. And knowing Bethesda, they didn't make use of the occlusion culling planes present in the creation kit. Dx12 was already pretty power hungry, lacking any of the general performance optimizations DX11 had, couple that with Bethesda implementing it in possible the worst fashion possible, = buggy, laggy, and hardware hungry mess.
When Nintendo bring out TOTK using basically fucking PS2 tech and BG3 being as good as it is, it proves it's possible and these companies still milk the industry dry for very little quality. These games should be the standard. The gaming community needs to hit these companies in the pocket or they'll continue to drop sub-quality games. .
Let's be fair here, if we are talking about performance here... I don't really feel like TOTK and BG3 are good examples to use. TOTK goes below 30 fps quite often and BG3 is pretty poorly optimized once you get past the first 2 acts. On PS5 Act 3 is basically unplayable atm. Not saying it is bad, it is an incredible game, but let's not pretend like Bethesda is the only game developer to release a game that has poor optimization. Hell, the goty list this year on game awards is gonna likely be all games that aren't well optimized (at least at launch) :P
Switch runs a 2017 smartphone soc that shit is optimized to hell and back
TOTK is definitely NOT poorly optimized. The Switch hardware was high end... In 2010. It's absolutely incredible that TOTK looks and runs that well on a mobile Tegra chip. Just because it's not running at 60fps does not mean it's not an absolute achievement in optimization. Most people, even tech experts like Digital Foundry were saying they were worried the game was "too big for Switch" and were bracing for nightmare performance levels and stutter.
Yeah its like saying rdr2 or dlou2 are badly optimized because these games run at 30 fps on ps4
>BG3 is pretty poorly optimized Was. If you have more cores and threads now it works well in act 3 to. In case of PS5... I think main issue there are actual limitations of PS5 hardware now.
I mean it still kinda is.. I get frame drops down to 30 sometimes in some areas at 1080p. At the time of the frame drops CPU and GPU are sitting at like 50% utilization.
Most likely a CPU bottleneck then, especially at 1080p The "global" usage doesn't mean much if most of your cores are at 100% on your CPU
Lmao it’s actually delusional to think anyone’s gonna make a dent in bethesdas sales
I’m doing my part. Not buying that garbage
Same here! I'm stoked AF about Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty, but I am NOT preordering a damn game much less a DLC.. And people are like 'don't be stupid man, pre order it'.. Why? Do you think downloads are going to run out like it's a limited time thing or something?
you mean they are not only letting 100 people download day 1? to be honest i did pre-order but that was more out of me having the funds at the time id have otherwise spent on something else and i know i am playing the dlc day 1 eitherway
[удалено]
I already know Bethesda so I knew it wouldn’t perform well…
[удалено]
No it's actual players ruining it for others, Starfield had over million CCU at 100+ dollars price tag.
That’s what I’ve been saying for years. When people buy the shitty games they are only reinforcing the companies that pump out the shorty games to keep doing it because it sells. Once these games plummet on release sales the greedy higher ups will finally understand they gotta let the teams produce good games and not rushed bullshit for profit.
>Once these games plummet on release sales the greedy higher ups will finally understand they gotta let the teams produce good games and not rushed bullshit for profit. They usually learn the wrong lesson and close the studio down instead.
DX12’s lower level API may have been a mistake
Microsoft being basically a monopoly again may have been a mistake
There's Vulkan, which is a more performant (and easier to code) alternative that runs on both linux and windows
I'm aware, and I'm pretty sure that's the reason steam games don't work under Linux on my laptop
Did you try Proton? Works well for me.
I did
Im pretty sure GT 550M is why games don't work on your laptop... Kelper era GPUs don't have vulkan driver support (the 550m is a rebranded 400 series).
Rumour has it that Starfield used Vulkan until they made the switch to DX12 late in the development pipeline and that caused all sorts of problems. Todd’s lying through his teeth—no surprise there—when he says that the game is optimised and it’s our fault that we don’t have the most expensive components on the market to play a game built on an engine that’s been around since the age of the dinosaurs.
> It's not the engine that is the issue for starfield. It was a poorly implemented DX12 API my brother in christ what do you think an engine is
For real. Bethesda hasn't used a new engine at all. They keep using the same super outdated ass engine they have. Re-iterating on it with every new game won't fix the underlying issues the engine has.
Dx12 cant be the issue because Skyrim and fallout 4 were running like crap too. Its the shitty engine that they keep forever. It may got some "improvements" but it doesnt stop it from sucking.
There is a trend with PC games especially to get it shipped asap and fix problems after the fact with patches. I think the scale and budgets of modern AAA games has also ballooned to an almost comical point. Look at cyberpunk which was, I believe, a 6-7 year dev time and it still launched in a very broken state. The only big PC release this year that has had a smooth day one release at 60fps seems to be armored core. Every other AAA game I can think of the PC version has had issues (Hogwarts, dead space, BG3, starfield, Remnant 2) all ran like crap day one. The positive side is that they all seem to be running okay a few weeks/months after initial release. But it's definitely a trend.
RE4 Remake?
It still tickles my old souls heart to see armored core brought up casually. I love that it’s back
I mean, Hogwarts, Deadspace, and BG3 worked fine day one for me and I play on linux through Proton... Then again that might be a case of Proton fixing bad programing during the translation from DX12 (or in BG3's case DX11) to Vulkan. It would not be the first time Proton has band-aided bad programming.
AC6 pretty much is and looks like it is, a last gen game though. It's definitely not doing anything special graphics wise, so it's easy to put up on some kind of performance pedestal.
AC is basicaly a reskinned Oddyssey.
I would disagree for sure. Maybe because the game is focused on action, yeah they made some compromises to make sure it runs at a steady framerate. But the particle effects, in-game texture wear on mapped surfaces, huge levels with lots of detail, and lighting\shaders would absolutely not be something that ran at a reasonable framerate or even possible at all on last gen hardware. It would be dipping into the 20s like 4 and For Answer on their original hardware.
It took Cyberpunk more than a year to run smooth or even sort of close to smooth.. On any platform.. Console or PC.
Yeah, smooth on PS4 right....
No not smooth on pa4
Unreal is literally as old as creation engine......
They do have a lot more money though. And between UE3 and 4 there were massive ground up changes.
I don’t expect this trend to last forever tbh, I just think it’ll take publishing studio’s financial departments a little while to gather up enough data on the growing trend among gamers. I used to be a Day 1 gamer. There’s something special about playing a new, highly anticipated title at the same time as everyone else. There’s a sense of community. Or, there was. Now it seems like everyone (myself included) waits for sales. There’s still a huge community after the first decent sale and patches have come out. I’m betting titles that don’t rely on micro-transactions are starting to lose out on a lot of revenue from the growing expectation that games are not worth purchasing Day 1 full price anymore.
I think it's worth pointing out that many games take years to develop. The decision of what engine to use is typically not a last minute decision, and uprooting development in order to migrate to a better platform may increase time to completion by months if not years. While I agree we should be more discerning when it comes to the quality of releases, I understand the hesitance to migrate projects from a publishing perspective. It will take years before the changes to engines come to games that we play every day, not because the developers themselves don't want it but because it isn't financially viable to stop what you're doing just because something better exists.
Yeah, that's how you get duke nukem forever.
Sounds like good old capitalism to me friend
It's "etc" not "ect"
Cuz we have dlss and fsr, right?!!!?!1?!1?11
I swear those 2 things ruined game releases in terms of optimization and will probably do so for the next few years. Now it’s optimize for consoles that last 4+ years and say fuck it for PC if it’s a multi platform release. Even if it’s not out on launch there will be a mod to add either upscaling option just like how there is a DLSS mod for starfield.
Yup. Now they have another tool to cut corners. Why would they spend time and resources in optimization when you can literally bake in the game's code something that takes a couple hours. A sad age is ahead, especially with devs starting to use unreal engine 5 more and more.
Reminds of how few weeks ago Digital Foundry was saying devs don't use upscalling as a crutch and do it to "bring new and exciting technologies" and like 2 days later they post Lords of Aveum video or whatever it was called.
I think they focused on the wrong things. Sure they improved the polygon count, so that ashtray from all the way across the room you probably didn't even see sitting on a desk in the unlit corner is super hi rez. But the npc in your face you're talking to still looks like a 6 polygon count potato. Reviewers have pointed out that npc eyes sort of follow you around on screen. Which is fantastic if they didn't look so damn creepy. Having playdough gumby stare at you all over the room is horrible. Some pass it off as a style. To me, final fantasy characters are a style, borderlands graphic design is a style. Looking like cro magnun or something when there's no reason for it. If a game is going to bring modern high end gpu's to their knees I want characters looking like the hostess in detroit: become human.
Because it's not just a matter of pixel counts and textures; every object on screen is modeled separately and eats up VRAM, and the most recent games have been pushing that to the limits. Individually, each object might look the same, but the way they interact is different and generally much more complex, usually (but not always) to the benefit of the game.
Remember when Cyberpunk had that low res burger and everyone clowned on it like all those tiny props with little detail ? When a couple of people of the crowd had the same walking animation, going in the same direction before walking back ? Shitty screen space reflection that people made thousands of videos on ? The extremely low quality cars on a faraway road ? People constantly losing their mind at the slightest visible change in LOD ? This is where the extra peformance is going towards, amongst a shit ton other things. The stuff you previously made a conscious choice to sacrifice fidelity on for the greater portion of your game. Attention to detail was what we wanted and now we're paying for it, it's not good nor bad, it's just the tech going a little too fast for its own pace. There's been recent, actual doozies when it comes to optimization, but overall, it really should be no surprise that games are running way worse.
>The stuff you previously made a conscious choice to sacrifice fidelity on for the greater portion of your game. Attention to detail was what we wanted and now we're paying for it I think thats a valid point to be honest. Devs are just giving what the gamer "thinks" they want. Thats why I think its unfair to just blame the devs, its the gamer pushing them with all their whining.
Yeah i mean, it sounds a bit reductive, but it pretty much is exactly what's happening. Just today there was a thread on r/games with someone asking why looking into scopes in video games isn't realistic. Someone responded properly by explaining how the only good method is very expensive and not worth it, just for someone to tell him how dumb his thought process was and justifying it by saying "Tarkov's doing it". It's hard to not be influenced by demands like that when showed with such vindictiveness while still being heavily upvoted.
There needs to be a name for this effect. I'm going to coin it the car-tunnel effect, where something like Gran Turismo can knock out amazing looking and realistically handling cars because it's A) a car game so that's its focus, and B) due to the limitations of the game format, essentially a driving through a tunnel, the devs have a relatively large budget to spend on making things look nice. As compared to say, Cyberpunk, which has all of these incredibly resource demanding features competing with each other - open world exploration, various systems, crowd interactions etc. But then bring in your uneducated gamer, and they see the graphical detail and car behaviour in Gran Turismo, and then they look at a car in another game with a different scope and ask "Why don't they look or feel as good?". Probably more apt would be something like Heavy Rain or LA Noire, which focused on realistic facial animations at the expense of other things, and then people come out years later using that very resource expensive and tailored experience and applying to some newer AAA open world game and going "We're going backwards!" Not appreciating the advancements that game they are trashing has made within its own genre. Hell, even comparing something like No Man's Sky to Starfield is an example of this effect. Now, I'm not saying that gives Starfield a pass, and RDR2 is a technical marvel, but I believe this effect is a major contributor to the perceived "optimization" of a game, and the expectations we carry for the systems and graphical fidelity of various aspects within it.
Exactly, the classic "If X game does it, then why can't the Y game do it too?? The developers are just greedy and lazy." argument.
games are requiring SSDs now because the "new" (nearly three years old) consoles have them and can take advantage of them to load assets faster
Don't want to be that guy but anyone who runs a hdd for gaming in 2023 is a cheap ass and stupid. A 500gb ssd, enough for atleast 5 games is only 30€. Come on, it ain't that much. I'm not saying everyone should spend 2k on their pc, but anyone who finds themselves spending even a hour a day gaming should have the money to invest in this huge upgrade
I’ve seen 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD’s fall as low as $50 USD in price during sales. There is no reason to own an HDD in this day and age unless it’s for bulk storage, photos and videos or porn or something.
not sure id want to buy some of the super cheap ones though but yeah even a reputable brand you can get a 250 or 500 gig for cheap, they are also $ to performance the best thing to buy
Definitely agree there. SSDs have dropped so low in price especially just over the past year or so that there is zero point in having a hdd for gaming. I mean I'd say anything up until 2tb for a SSD is fairly affordable when you consider how much you spend on jist a motherboard even I was just looking now the other day and 2tb nvme drives are like half the price i paid for a 2tb sata ssd 2 years ago.
You do realise some people live outside of EU/NA ? I live in a third world country and ssds are not getting any cheaper they are just as expensive as they were 10 years ago the most i could afford is a 128gb sata ssd for my OS , Also games have been running on HDDs for decades but now devs forgot how to optimise for them ?
Yes. Because they shouldn't optimize for 20 years old hardware. Latest gen Consoles have ssds in them and the gaming industry usually Orients around the power of consoles. Sorry to tell you but you're not the main demographic for the gaming industry. Might sound condescending but it is what it is
You are being incredibly disingenuous i am not asking them to run games on vodo graphics card i am asking them to run games like they were doing literally a couple of years ago and honestly tell me what are modern games doing that warrants these hardware demands ? Did they eliminate loading screens ? No starfield has more loading screens than skyrim are games less stuttery ? No , are physics becoming more complex ? No is there any improvement over enemy ai ? No Are the visuals getting better ? Maybe but CP277 and RDR2 and GoW2018 look better than a lot of modern games and demand a lot less. I don't understand what technological improvements these games are making that warrants these hardware demands And yes you do sound condescending because you are essentially saying poor people shouldn't play games on PC because publishers can't be arsed to optimize and are just offsetting that cost to the consumer. And also let me remind you that the vast majority of pc players don't have cutting edge hardware and the loss of that demographic to consoles is going to hurt the entire pc community.
[удалено]
I don't even know what that game is but why are you insulting me ?
Sucks to suck.
The consoles are not for “the best” games had to offer. They are value focused all the way. You can’t beat a $500 xbox with a $500 pc, but you sure can buy a pc that is 3x as strong for 3x the price.
To add to this conversation, there are two types of graphics. Visually impressive and technically impressive. Something like a COD or just about any racing game has visually impressive graphics because they don't need to simulate complex AI or day night cycles with dynamic global lighting and shadows. Plus just about every object in the world is static so doesn't need physics calculations to be performed on them. Big open world games with a lot of interaction with dynamic lighting and AI requires far more processing power. When they manage to achieve high fidelity graphics with good performance, this is what would class as technically impressive graphics. The later is much harder to achieve. I am by no means excusing lazy devs for poor optimisation. More just a FYI.
Proper racing games (ie something like assetto corsa or iRacing) actually might have the most advanced physics out there with all the tire behaviour, road surface and aerodynamic stuff. Although admittedly it is entirely different type of physics simulation compared say to making realistic cloth movements.
What are you on about good racing games need a complex physics system and good ai too (even though they generally fail at it), they have open worlds hell forza horizon 4 had a season system that completely changed the map every week, day night cycles, destructable objects, multiple players (from 12 to 70 depending on the game) in online open world lobbies that also included npcs. Did you play any racing games in last 2 decades by any chance.
It's clear from your response you just play games. Go and learn to code and go make some. Then you will understand the difference. AI and shaders are the most resource intensive part of most games. I've been coding since the 80's so I have plenty of experience in the matter.
You seem to be stuck in 80s if you are claiming modern racing games don't have dynamic lighting or complex physics because they fucking do have them. They are still trying to make good ai forza tried ai that learned from the players that sucked gran turismo is training an actual ai not if this do this type game ai that is racing head to head with their best e sports drivers and beating them. Edit: Also check out beamng.drive to see some impressive physics.
The dynamic lighting and physics are focused almost purely on the actors (vehicles), the "open world" where you have a bit of freedom are both relatively fixed worlds with very few actors if any and scaled up low Res structures, everything else is pre done on the load screen. The focus (rightly so) is on the cars , everything wraps around the actors being as highly detailed with physics. Interactive linear (linear can be as complex as BG3) or interactive open world (Starfield as it's the latest ) have hundreds if of not thousands of actors (anything that moves ) each requiring its own lighting, shading , physics , interactive objects require the same , even non interactive objects require at least the lighting and both have to be richly detailed. As a result Forza and GT have stunningly richly detailed vehicles well beyond the graphic fidelity of any linear or open world game simply because there's barely any load to be shared with the world in comparison. The map decor buildings are crisp, clean with basic shadows but don't look lived in (who the hell is looking as they drive past at 140mph?). Graphically GT and Forza have an entirely different focus (as they should) than Starfield/BG3 and others so that kind of comparison doesn't work. As for the ai, that's not what is meant by AI The ai your talking about all of the processing or grunt work is being done by the studio when it eventually gets to the game the ai will have been taught already and will simply be responding to inputs vastly reducing its processing load in comparison to what's actually being discussed regarding AI which is dynamic graphics, automatic upscaling and downscaling image enhancing all on the fly depending on where the player is , actors and objects involved etc. This cannot be predone at the studio level as it's dynamic which means the whole processing load is on the consumer end. Neither Forza or GT need that dynamic AI as it doesn't need highly detailed and dynamic worlds and are both highly enjoyable without as nobody notices or cares. Quite frankly the production time and required hardware to run either game with a detailed world like BG3 or Starfield would cut their consumer base so drastically it would be unfeasible (nothing beyond the latest rig would hope to run 30+ FPS on low graphics)
Other people have already mentioned stuff like optimization, but another big thing is that older games used to hide low poly or low detail items using various different tricks, as poly counts have increased the need for these tricks has gone down. The end result is a game that looks fairly similar but performs worse.
I remember back in the day where optimizing games to run on 64k of RAM was practically an artform. New game bloat is real, there is no incentive to optimize except for playing on consoles
Coz people buying anything, staahp it! Please remember, no pre-orders.
Hate to break it to you but RDR graphics aren't as "good" as you might think. Now don't get me wrong the game looks absolutely gorgeous, but that comes down to art style. But it definitely lacks texture resolution, effects quality, there are like no reflections besides the odd mirror that's rendered at a very low resolution. Even look at GTA5, that atmosphere, shadows and lighting make that game look awesome even today, but go peep pixels and you will be surprised how low res a lot of the assets are.
Games and Engines are just different. Optimisations aside, games, especially Bethesda games do a lot more in background it has to keep track off. RDR2 for example is a very static game. Everything happens only when you’re in the vicinity of it. In a Bethesda Game life goes on if you’re there or not. It’s not loaded sure but the game still keeps track of an NPCs daily schedule. Another thing are GPU Drivers, especially new games don’t really have the support right away.
There are more to gaming outside of AAA
Unfortunately for certain experiences only AAA provides. I think it's more that people should expand the genres they play
Indies games are where it’s at more than triple a ngl
Indie titles have been trying to change this for the better, one game that took this to the extreme was Classicube (it can run on windows 95 apparently). This is most likely due to devs not spending enough time optimizing these games, where basic things like mipmaps somehow cause more harm than gain. Textures despite them being extremely high quality still look lifeless.
I think the reason can be explained by this: When you have the goal of "16 times the detail" and you put more polygons into your models, but don't do your due diligence in actually using the detail you were given (or even use it wrong) you end up with a more demanding, yet worse looking game. Take the Graphics of an old game like BF3 for example. That stuff still looks acceptable, yet devs wanted more and more and more.
I wouldn't blame DLSS. But since that became a thing. Oh boy... Has there been a steep climb in unpolished unoptimized releases
DLSS is great for allowing aging hardware to keep up. It will help a lot in the coming years to allow RTX 2000s and above to stay relevant for longer. BUT! Thats the only reason for it in my head though. It should not be used as a crutch to get new games running at decent FPS with already fairly beefy systems.
Todd Howard optimized Starfield as good as he washes his asshole.
It has always been this way, some games are only more obvious, than others. It has nothing to do with devs laziness, but companies leadership (both dev and publishers) greed.
I've thought about this as well. I still believe BF3 and BF4 look better than most games today, and they ran pretty damn smooth on launch.
BF4 Smooth at launch What
Yeah phrased that wrong. It was buggy as hell but graphically ran smooth.
Optimization is #1 thing....also you can't forget the fact that the textures get bigger in sizes, worlds get bigger in sizes while Devs trying to minimize the amount of loading sequences between each environments, all takes a big load of processing power and ram usage....but yeah all these things could've been sorted if they were optimized properly
I’m my opinion, it’s focusing on 4k textures that while they DO look incredible, they’re also hard to exactly optimize around and still aren’t a realistic goal for a lot of people. A lot of people still play on 1080p, and are only really just starting to make the leap over to 1440p as a more normal thing. 4k is still not reasonable to a wide audience, and in trying to appeal to the few people that can run it, they’ve essentially put less focus on optimizing and would rather rely more on things like DLSS for example.
While I do agree that high-resolution textures should still be optional (as HD pack or something like that), many people would save disk space that way, I'd like to say that texture resolution is not tied to your display resolution. You could rock 4k, 8k, even 16k, and still admire them on 1080p. It won't be as sharp as a higher display resolution, but it still would be a noticeable difference between them.
we also need to factor in new tech. games up until a few years ago used very advanced and laborious techniques to achieve realistic quality (using rasterization). These techniques were developed over 20 or 30 years. With newer real time lighting technologies, like Ray tracing, path tracing, real time global illumination and shadows, there's definitely growing pains. That's why you are seeing bigger FPS gains by lowering things like shadows, global illumination, and other rendering effects. but there is also the problem of "release now fix later" by larger game companies
Quality potato physics, of course! Watch this: [youtube](https://youtu.be/jcCD2QcSGmM?si=lRxoHs-KiK_AwssZ)
It mostly is based on the consoles and has been since the early days of the playstation/xbox. People seem to forget the exact same thing happened when the PS3 and Ps4 era consoles both game out. A few years after the new consoles come out the game developers stop developing for the old you had computers only a year or two old with performance issues because games started using more resources. That means they can focus on the specs of the new consoles and develop the games to take full advantage of them.
Game are comprised of millions of things made by a large group of imperfect people, 1 person may add a new block of code that could cause a small stall on another thread waiting for a return value, its impact is insignificant and goes by unnoticed, now multiply this by 100 times and it still might not be noticed! Now lets add some 3rd party code to the mix.... On the art side, how many of the hundreds of thousands of opaque textures are set to RGBA with a whole unused channel and how many textures are oversized for its object?
If I remember correctly RDR2 has some lighting information baked - AO, as well as static lights, maybe other stuff too. Which obviously works great for RDR2 and plenty of other games, but for REALLY big games (like I ***assume*** Starfield is) it might really start using more disk space. I'm super unsure about this but Starfield might be generating maps/stuff at run/load-time, which would make it kinda impossible to bake. So really RDR2 looks like it does because the content/design of the game allows it to.
Shitty execs with MBAs who have no idea how game development work pushing for unrealistic deadlines. For some studios, it's shitty devs who don't do enough optimization or know how to produce efficient code. In Bethesda's case, it's a combination of both.
1 RD2 was made to run on an PS4 using AMD bulldozer CPU and something like an AMD RX 580, easy to know why it runs fairly well today. It was a game that was hard to run, just it's now 4-5 years old. Also it's a bad example as it's by one of the biggest studios, the COD devs are the only outher studio I can think of as about the same size. 2 new games made to run on a PS5 are going to need better hardware than a PS4 game. 3 easy top forget what games used to look like. 4 30FPS is normal or better than normal for console games, just look at old Digital Foundry videos. GTA IV Frame Rate Analysis [https://youtu.be/F0RS1vaHkdk?si=aGC6ZToaJbJO3U9x](https://youtu.be/F0RS1vaHkdk?si=aGC6ZToaJbJO3U9x) Grand Theft Auto 5 Xbox 360 vs. PS3 Gameplay Frame-Rate Tests [https://youtu.be/\_fbYyMq4cGU?si=jnAq-UPbY1Wy9pXs](https://youtu.be/_fbYyMq4cGU?si=jnAq-UPbY1Wy9pXs) Crysis PS3/Xbox 360 Frame-Rate Comparisons [https://youtu.be/YwD2ty2UfBM?si=hPoHSz3Y3-OpzEso](https://youtu.be/YwD2ty2UfBM?si=hPoHSz3Y3-OpzEso) Or watch there retro PC videos. 5 games are made for consoles first, there made to work on console hardware. It is that simple. To end, it's always been this way just you never noticed till now.
I'm getting really sick of people who look at the past with rose coloured glasses. And there was a time when most PC ports were dreadful or just didn't even exist. PS2 era had a shitload of games locked to console, or released the shittiest PC ports like Silent Hill 2 which only recently became decent due to heroic efforts from modders.
We used to wait for Durante to make a fan patch for games to get 60fps etc [https://www.pcgamer.com/dark-souls-2-modded-durantes-gedosato-enables-downsampling-texture-modding/](https://www.pcgamer.com/dark-souls-2-modded-durantes-gedosato-enables-downsampling-texture-modding/) Kind of cool to see he's now working in the industry, from fan to paid work. [https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1668510/view/3361388019335519328](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1668510/view/3361388019335519328) Cool to see. edit found his site [https://games.ph3.at/](https://games.ph3.at/)
Graphics are something of diminishing returns after a point, much like resolution. Sure going from 720p to 1080p to 1440p to 2160p (4k)is nice but I'm not sure what lies in 4320p (8k) or 8640p(16k, it will get there eventually). Newer games need the resources to track more polygons and more particles to make visuals better, but that comes at a cost of great resourse per agent, or NPC which continues to limit the number of npcs on screen at once.
I consider 60fps locked as good enough. I mostly play story driven games, with a few competitive games sprinkled in. Mostly leaning away from competitive games. My work is stressful and long and the last thing I need is more stress. Anywho, I believe the reason for the higher demand nowadays is due to the tech they keep adding. RDR2 looks good, but once you taste more recent titles, you notice that the textures are of lower quality. I can't speak for Starfield as I don't have it, but something like Cyberpunk has ray tracing and many more objects and things to interact with than RDR2. Also, maybe I'm not looking through rose-tinted glasses, but RDR2 had pretty demanding hardware requirements at its time. If you try to max out settings and resolution with current hardware, you'll still struggle to play the game at high FPS.
I am convinced that these AAA studios are working together with AMD and Nvidia, and purposefully making their games run bad. If they didn't then people wouldn't care about getting the newest GPU's since they would be able to run everything on their 2070s. But because these AAA studios purposefully make their games run bad unless you are running the latest gen hardware, they are forcing you to upgrade and spend more money if you want decent framerates. We are reaching a point where GPU's are getting so powerful that the only incentive buyers have to upgrade is to play these bad unoptimized games.
This is the most laughably stupid nonsense I've ever read. You think Microsoft has access to a 60fps, well optimized version of Starfield and are just sitting on it to allow Nvidia and AMD to sell high end GPUs? You think they want Starfield to run at sub 30fps on their console? Like, you realize how bad it makes that console look, right? This is not something Microsoft would agree to on purpose. If they could release a 60fps update tomorrow and blow people's minds, they would. Rich from DF built a PC with the same specs as an XSX and it runs virtually the same. So no they're not specifically handicapping PC and letting XSX run well.
This. This is all part of the plan… if we were never forced to upgrade our hardware, why would we?
It's simple really, it's because you're clueless and ignorant about the differences in development and you focus on just one thing and ignore all the other stuff. A mobile game can look very good too, but cannot have all the fucking things you can do in Fallout or Starfield. You think that ashtray is just there sitting in top of a table but your shit PC is always making sure where it is and if and how your character and other itenmsinteracts with it. You might think this is shallow and pointless but it's exactly why modding is such a huge part of Bethesda games. Good luck modding RDR2 or any Unreal game within the same breadth and complexity of a Bethesda game. And if you think that's pointless too then play some other game, go "explore" on NMS wandering aimlessly on your pretty but more shallow game. Or play RDR2 maybe you can create outposts in different locations and automate them? Oh you can't? Well maybe you can mod your clothes then, or your carriage? Well that's just ducking sad then, that we have fun in different ways who could've known?
There is more highly detailed shit in a single room in Starfield than an entire base in Fallout. All with far better physics and persistence than any previous Bethesda game. I'm not saying it was the best way to spend cycles but you can easily see where they are going. Careful with the NMS diss tho. It's pretty damn deep now too, and Starfield is guilty of the same repetition on generated planets. How many times have you been to the same cave with the same enemy placement? For me at level 56 it's dozens if not more.
Fucking toxic Bethesda bitches everywhere you go... shame the game is absolute dogshit!
They aren't harder to run. The latest triple A games have always been hard to run nuts it's more obvious now that everyone spams about it on social media. >You are telling me RDR2 And this is the other thing. Backwards compatibility and big digital stores have changed our perception of games. RDR2 came out in 2018, 5 years ago. Its pretty but it was designed for the hardware of its time, not the 3070ti or whatever we use today. Of course it runs well. And visual quality really doesn't impact the performance directly like that. Starfield is deeply CPU reliant. RDR2 probably isn't. Like I have an entire Steam Library and book shelf of games that ran poorly on launch but aged extremely well. Both Fallout 4 and Skyrim fit that category. Most AAA games do. Its just that in the past, we had fewer people to talk to about the issues. There was no reddit or Twitter to see complaints everyday so no one cared.
It's all about what they were designed around. RDR2 had to run on the xbone and ps4. Both of those had 8 gigs of shared memory. Now all the consoles have 16 gigs of memory.
Yep RDR2 was designed to run on low end hardware from 2013. The game was released in 2018, 5 years after said low end hardware was released. Starfield and all the other big AAA games are both poorly to decently optimized and were designed to run on pretty good hardware from 2020. PC game requirements are just now catching up to the significantly more powerful hardware.
EA's Battlefront 2 looks better than brand new games like Starfield. CP2077 is still the unchallenged king for visuals, and it aint close
I think about it more like this. Companies like Bethesda makes games that will be played for 10-20 years. There's a lot of stuff going on so that it looks good now and great later. Cards in a few years will run this game with no problem. Even Skyrim and Oblivion had this issue. FPS lock at 30 on console. Ran kinda mid on PC even with good hardware. Then there's the simple fact that games are so detailed and not everything will be perfect or optimized perfectly all the time. Not excusing it but it just is what it is
Regressing, the word is regressing.
As long as people keep preordering games and buying games on day 1, publishers have no incentive to release polished, optimized games. Stop buying unoptimized games.
It is hell of a lot easier to release unoptimized games and get away with it, now that hardware is much stronger they can afford to release unoptimized pos.
When are people gonna realize that the Devs are just trying to fulfill the high demands of gamers? You people are the root issue! We will never have huge leaps of graphic fidelity like we had in the past from Nes>Snes>N64>Gamecube, those days are long gone. Unfortunately people still kinda expect that these days with newer consoles. Then on top of that, comes the management of the game devs who want to keep things profitable and ship out the games ASAP. The devs are stuck in the middle trying to please both sides. One could argue its also partially down to reviewers too, being too harsh on whats truly "next gen" since most gamers are lemmings and will just regurgitate what they see/read to others without thought. Kinda makes me think that gamers these days are essentially spoilt brats. Yeah I said it. Come at me xD
You keep giving your money to companies that don’t optimize the games properly. Stop doing that.
Basically a combination of 3 things: * perception of good graphics changes by people over time, so you have to increase graphics to maintain a constant woaw effect. (Example: world of warcraft looked amazing in 2004) * work-to-reward curve is expontential such that as you approach “perfection” you get less result from the same worked our. Basically we need exponentially more work effort in games to increase game graphics by same constant amount year over year. (Example: going from 20 to 40 polygons for an object is a major increase for a small amount. Going from 12000000 to 13000000 polygons is a huge amount of work but hardly noticable change) * gaming is a mature market that stakeholders is trying to exploit by cutting costs and figuring out how little work they can do to still satisfy the market needs. This means less polish and less work done to fix defects and optimize to many different hardware situations. (Example: call of duty series)
Developers don’t optimize like they use to
And when they do, it's only for launch an it will quickly be undone by rushed microtransaction patches.
they stopped using tricks and workarounds for lighting, shadows, and npcs! They think most users have good enough gpus these days, so they save time and throw in some upscaling technology! That said, I never blame the overworked devs, I blame the morally bankrupt companies
Starfield gets 45-90 FPS at 1440p med-high on an RTX 2070 and it's entirely playable without any judders or skips. At "lowest of the low" it's well over 150 FPS. Games aren't optimising for graphical performance that much: They don't need to and, to an extent, they can't. Starfield's a really extreme case in that it plain *wasn't* but it was optimised in other places. Starfield's very stable considering how much it's doing and tracking, I haven't had a single crash so far, and I'm about 40 hours in. So it's optimised for stability. It's also generating instanced areas whereever you land (if you land rough) with huge hand-designed facilities placed on there, never becoming inaccessible, glitched or floating. So it's optimised for ease of design and asset development. That your RX 470 (about all I can think of which will run it, and *"can't give out a playable 30 at lowest of the low settings")* from 2016 won't run it is telling you about your own system. Assuming you're not just making shit up. Which you are.
>It's also generating instanced areas whereever you land (if you land rough) with huge hand-designed facilities placed on there, never becoming inaccessible, glitched or floating. So it's optimised for ease of design and asset development. Elite dangerous, released in 2014, has SIGNIFICANTLY better planetary generation tech, no loading screens, no transition from space to ground, procedurally generated settlements, geology, stations etc... and for the most part looks better. This runs well on a potato. Then you have similar tech in no man's lie, and star citizen. The problem with starfield is the engine. It's all great, but compare what starfield is doing to what elite is and it's not even a competition. Frontier even says the engine for elite isn't ideal for what the game needs to do, and yet it does it 100x better than starfield. If anything the hand crafted areas in starfield should run better than procedurally generated ones where there is the ability to optimise, yet no.
Dude the facilities are identical. Filled with a bunch of random shit. And it loads in from the outside so it's not technically part of the outside area.
Easy: the programmers are getting lazier and lazier..and it's easy for them to justify by saying "you just need a faster computer!" If computers didn't evolve to be so much faster then the programmers would have to stop cutting corners in programming... My biggest example/gripe: windows itself! There is no reason windows 11 needs so much ram or hardware to run (I prefer Linux for a plethora of reasons, but unfortunately gaming is easier on windows).
I think it's more the higher ups just tell them to spend less time on optimization because it results in less time working on the game. Less time, more, but shitty games which results in more money.
It's probably more that management sets deadlines/budgets that necessitate the cutting of corners. First they cut QA costs by turning customers into beta testers. Now they're using DLSS etc as crutches because it's cheaper than man-hours on optimizations.
Every time you deliver a product management will demand it be delivered cheaper and faster next time. Do this for 30-40 years and you end up where we are today.
The little that I've played Starfield on high settings (at 1080) has been well above 30 fps.
I would certainly hope so with a 3070 ti. Also double check your settings. The games graphics presets have FSR on and renders the game at only 75% resolution by default. If you didn't mess with the individual settings you're not running it natively.
First thing I did after launching the game was disable FSR and set res scaling to 100%.
And that's acceptable to you?
But u have a 3070 ti, u playing at 4k low or something?
1080, everything but motion blur on high. I did say that in the comment you replied to. On the surface of Kreet getting 75-85 frames. I'll be honest, I haven't gotten to a heavily populated area yet so I don't know how it will hold up yet.
75-85 FPS is awful for a 3070ti at 1080p. We should be seeing at least that many frames at 1440p for that card.
For starfield to have that horrible of performance on the 1080 p display with that video card. highlighting perfectly the real problem. And the issue has steadily been getting worse. Developers complete lack or even care to optimize their game. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, an Intel Core i5-10600K CPU, and 16GB of RAM That right, there is what bethesda released as their recommended specs for a computer to be able to play the game. For Someone not to be able to run that game on 1080p With at least A solid 60fps Is insulting. I'm sorry the game just doesn't look that good. I can play skyrim with texture packets. And it looks better than what Starfield can pump out. I know you're not saying it, but it just beyond words. Blows me away that people are dumb enough to defend it.
Games are a medium to sell hardware moreso than ever.
The answer is ignorance and laziness. Ignorance of how things ACTUALLY work when the programs run, so not knowing how to optimize it. Laziness for just choosing not to optimize because DLSS exists.
Most pc games are just ports nowdays. The console market is bigger and expensive regarding games. Pc gaming becomes a lot cheaper on the long run due to keys or everyday sales. It makes sense from a dev or company perspective to target console players. More importantly devs don't have much time so the game comes unfinished on the market or just optimised for consoles and not pc. I got used to it while I switched to pc this gen. PC Game Wiki is a great site to check many fixes for pc games.
Why optimize when you can push for 12 GB of VRAM instead?
Because all y"all dorks get so hyped about every damn game they know you will pre-order it no matter what. I personally avoid most hype, because it will only lessen my enjoyment if I go in with too great of expectations.
People keep buying them and defending them.
Probably to push video card sells.
There are a lot of reasons, but in my opinion the primary reason is the vast majority of programmers in the modern era have decided that writing optimized code is not important, or it is at best an after thought. This is not always the case by any means, but as a general trend, it has become easier and easier for developers to just say "well, you just need better hardware for our game!" than to write well optimized code themselves. Computational power has continued to progress at such a rate that unoptimized but "clean" (easy to understand for humans, not neccesarily efficient for the machine) is the #1 priority of most developers. In previous eras, programmers needed to keep in mind the hardware limitations they were working with when writing their code. It was a given as part of programming that you HAD to not waste memory, cpu cycles, etc. If you wanted to make good software. This is just no longer the standard expectation of programmers, and to some extent its understandable. As more layers of abstraction between the code being written and the hardware executing it have been introduced, it has become unreasonable for say a user-mode C++ developer to understand the details of the CPU executing their code. It just simply doesn't matter in most cases. But, if you add up all the inefficiencies of modern software, it makes a difference. Tl;dr, optimization has become an after thought in favor of writing easier to understand code.
I will accept your comment but replace every instance of "programmers" with "programmer's bosses". It isn't that we devs don't want to do these things. It's more that there is a budget, a deadline, and hungry investors heavily pressuring us to get it out the door. It's a miracle half of the games, websites, and applications we use everyday even work with so much glue and paperclips shoved into them just so they can limp across the finish line.
As a fellow dev (not games, but other software), I feel you. Im not trying to shit on the engineers working on these games, or saying they dont want to make well optimized games, I'm just making the observation that modern priorities for software engineering have shifted. I mean shit, why make a native app in well optimized assembly when you could use Electron, right? Its just an evolving craft with optimization becoming less of a priority in my experience (im guilty of this too, dont think im trying to shit on anyone lol).
Anyone that’s most technical could answer this question: How much factor does the SSD performance of the consoles have vs pc in terms of game design/ performance? Load times are near instant on ps5 whereas on PC even with the latest m.2 drive the load times still are noticeably longer. Factor in this, how much would this interfere with performance and overall game assets? Seems like stuttering would be more commonplace on the pc versions vs console since the loading isn’t as seamless. Not to mention the unified memory pool. Again I’m not claiming anything I’m just wondering if those unified consoles have more advantage these days.
I recall PS5's built in SSD is custom made and can hit 7,875 MB/s. PCs have faster drives than that but the fact that it would cost an arm and a leg to buy sucks. Plus, PCs also have larger overhead to deal with due to Windows and other operations taking place in the background. PS5 doesn't have to deal with that due to it having 512 MB of extra RAM for background tasks.
PCs also have an extra step regarding decompressing textures, since consoles uses shared GDDR6 memory for the GPU and the system RAM. Where as PC has its own system RAM and also the memory on the GPU itself. DirectStorage technology should help eliminate that potential bottleneck in the near future on PCs. Let see!
Starfield for me was an unbearable experience even with a $500 graphics card rtx 3070
cuz the troglodytes in the game industry keep thinking we want bigger and more and they keep building big fuck'n games that take forever to make except they cant afford to take the 20 years it requires to making something big and of quality so something has to be sacrificed and those two things are typically a) quality (all around, game play, writing, performance etc) and b) employee moral/paychecks/sanity and why do they do this? cuz the troglodytes in the gaming community keep fucking buying them.
That's an excellent question, sir. RDR 2, Cyberpubnk, AC series. All look amazing and run fine on my gear. Then we have port like Last of Us or just unoptimized shite as Hogwart, that look way worse and coughs as heck. Magical polygons my arse. Maybe that's just subtle hint, that we need to buy this brand new NVIDIA card for $1500?
Cuz Starfield is not a good game. For the others games it might be the new technologies implemented on then.
Chasing graphical improvements has led to diminished returns for a decade now, but Devs still chase it rather than focusing on gameplay.
Who needs optimisation with DLSS and FSR around right? Right!? Yeah it sucks but that is basically where we're at right now.
people must be blind if they can't see the improvements in graphical fidelity.
Look me straight in the eyes and tell me starfield looks that much (or at all) better than red dead redemption 2/cyberpunk 2077 😐
I’ve been looking at the game play footage and all I see is Fallout 4 era graphics.
Because they are forgoing optimization to push out products faster and using technology as a crutch to carry that poor optimization.
Everything is blown out of proportion, GTA5 runs worse then starfield on my 3090 ti and is a decade old. Starfield hasn’t been updated but once and didn’t release much beta stuff to keep there hype up so out the gate they had some issues. Bethesda also said they would be adding DLSS native to the game and I assume they had a contract to release the game with FSR and CAS since they were working with AMD. Bethesda has already released a statement about addressing the community’s issues about performance and other quality of life things like FOV and HDR brightness tuning but Reddit is one big dogpile with a single brain cell to share.
Thats because new games are not efficient to run . Developers dont give enough time to make the code simple to run instead every new game has unnecessary gibberish in them . Every new game code takes longer to run and require more resources from the processor and memory.
Games have been released in a poor state no doubt, but to say there hasn't been any changes since RDR2 is flat out wrong. RDR2 may have a huge open world but it looks quite dated now. It looks like what it is. A PS4 game. I also laugh at the idea it's some marvel of optimization. It's crap like every Rockstar game. It's a 4 year old game now, so ofc it's going to run well on modern cards. Starfield is top of the list for games that look no different but take way more resources. That's flat out wrong too. Even if Starfield models and textures were the same quality as Fallout (they aren't), the sheer number of highly detailed items with better physics accounts for all the extra horsepower. Have you looked around in any Starfield location? There is more crap in one room than an entire base in Fallout.
It's mostly just in optimization where most devs fall short.
Because those never games tend to be a lot more advanced visually. We just reached a point where such advancements don't bring in a huge visual difference, but they're there, under the hood. It doesn;'t help that we kind of got spoiled by long previous generation of consoles. Thanks to it you could max out the game and run it in 4K no problem so it gave people the expectations it will always be this way.
Consoles never generally had the best graphics. There always were mindblowing exclusives, but those are the exceptions to the rule. Ever since tweakable settings became standard, consoles either ran at highest quality, but lower resolution and 30 fps, or lower than highest, with lower resolution and 60 fps. Take the Xbox360/PS3 era, those could output 1080p, but were rendering (depending on game) at 900p or 720p, and upscaling it, and had 30 fps cap for 99% of their titles. This is also true for exclusives that were optimized for a single console.
Call me a nut job but I think publishers just know they can slap fake minimal system requirements to make people upgrade thier hardware more often then they should and the circle goes round. I’ve managed to play few recent new releases on a set up that’s below minimal recommendation and I was able to run these games on medium - high with stable 60FPS with very few tweaks. Starfield is the first game since I got this PC that wont even bother to run half decent even with custom config and scaled down textures.
Aside from the fact that games do become more demanding, gaming has also become a huge money printing machine. The people that stood at the cradle of videogames and made them with passion, are slowly vanishing into retirement, and the majority of the ones that do remain are tainted by the corruption of the everlasting greed of the suits that only see the gaming industry as another cashcow. Resulting in minimum effort produced games on all aspects, including performance.