Are we going to get more optimized games on PC in the near future or will it be the same old story?

[F.E.A.R.]

Kinda interested what everyone thinks, if there's any hope that we'll get more optimized games as time passes by or will it be the same bullshit like it has been for more than two decades? From my point of view, the most optimized games are Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal (I could be wrong), both games can run on ancient machines (I know Linus did a video on Doom 2016 running on a really old PC, can't find the video though) while games like RDR2 can barely run on both old and new hardware. It's like IdSoftware does something that others Developers either refuse or don't want to do and just want to get your money and then complain about "piracy". Games like RE2:RE and RE3:RE are well optimized but not as much as Doom. Considering CapCom still hasn't fixed the stuttering issues with RE2:RE since it's release, though the stuttering isn't present in RE3:RE.

 

I'm not an expert on this, but I don't know if IdTech engine is that really good or is it something to do with Vulkan implementation, considering IdSoftware are the only ones who know how to use the Vulkan API. I've read comments on the net saying that Vulkan is better for games and Devs should use it over DX12 which is "crap". Most devs use way too old engines to make games, and some just make them shitty from the ground, take a look at Rockstar and there 10+ year engine that they've used? GTA4 and RDR2 run horribly. Another example would be the Source engine, the engine served it's purpose but having to modify the engine in order to make a game run the way you want is just meh.

 

Still it's shit that we're getting unoptimized games on such advanced hardware compare to what once was, where devs were limited by hardware and had to go around with stuff in order to make the games even run. Nowadays hardware limits are minimal, and yet they don't even wanna try make a game run well. We can see the same with older games that we're ported from consoles to PC and they we're just TERRIBLE (and they still refuse to port old games on modern hardware, like CapCom). And not to mention they have DRM, selling us games without even us owing them, and they can just pull them whenever they want, the only thing's left is subscription to pay monthly or yearly in order to play a game.

 

I'm kinda pessimistic, but I want to hear what others think, I mean in tech hardware we've witnessed the rise of AMD, are we going to see better optimized games in the gaming industry, or is it going to be the same old shit, with lootboxes, pre-order and half-baked games?

[Fasauceome]

Overwatch, valorant, CSGO, these games run pretty great on crappy computers (relatively speaking). Not sure what you mean by "poorly optimized," since some games are just too demanding but still run well. The newer tomb raider games, for example, look quite excellent on max settings, but of course demand more from the hardware for it. Not poorly optimized, per se.

[Senzelian]

I get 3000 FPS on Minesweeper, but Crysis 3 won't run at 8K. Clearly Crytek is really bad at optimizing games.

 

And these are the sort of arguments I see in the PC enthusiast community.

[TempestCatto]

Not gonna read the wall of text but I came here to say this in response to the title.

 

It's gonna get better. With actual PC hardware in the new consoles, it should be much easier to port games from one to the other. Other than maybe some proprietary code for Xbox and PlayStation OS's, it should almost kinda be like a copy/paste type of thing (keyword almost).

 

The one game (sim) that comes to mind is the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. The trailer below was shot on an Xbox. If it looks like that on Xbox, one can only imagine what it will look like on a fully roided out PC.

 

[F.E.A.R.]

37 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Overwatch, valorant, CSGO, these games run pretty great on crappy computers (relatively speaking). Not sure what you mean by "poorly optimized," since some games are just too demanding but still run well. The newer tomb raider games, for example, look quite excellent on max settings, but of course demand more from the hardware for it. Not poorly optimized, per se.

I'm not talking about those games, I'm talking about single player games not being optimized and later getting patched upon release, giving us have baked games, this is now news, even YouTube game journalists have covered this stuff. Just look at RDR2 and backlash it recieved upon relase. GN and Harbor Unboxed had to do videos on how to get the game properly running. 

 

30 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

I get 3000 FPS on Minesweeper, but Crysis 3 won't run at 8K. Clearly Crytek is really bad at optimizing games.

 

And these are the sort of arguments I see in the PC enthusiast community.

I said nothing about Crysis 3 because I didn't play it, and the original Crsyis can run on old hardware. 

[Senzelian]

8 minutes ago, F.E.A.R. said:

I said nothing about Crysis 3 because I didn't play it, and the original Crsyis can run on old hardware. 

I know, but what are you trying to say?

[iBabySlapper]

There's always going to be poorly optimised games, especially Japanese ones that were originally console games. Some are worse than others obviously, it just depends on how much time they decide it's worth to them. As PCs get more and more popular, this might change but I doubt it since PCs are still the smaller minority, especially in Asia.

But in general, I think games are better optimised than they were a decade or two ago.

 

If a game studio does something you don't like, the solution is pretty simple. Don't give them a single dime: get a refund, give them a scathing review, whatever. It's pretty easy, I was a big fan of assasin's creed and Tom Clancy games, but I didn't like Uplay so I stopped buying Ubisoft games. I didn't like how EA was frankly taking the piss out of their customers with lower quality games and more microtransactions, so I stopped buying stuff from EA. Idea Factory makes truely awfully ported games, so I stopped buying their games. Go somewhere else, they don't deserve your cash. If you're still buying their stuff it means you agree with their decisions.

[PlayStation 2]

It's easier to build games for specific sets of hardware than to make it so it can run on many different sets of hardware. 

Doom 2016 and Eternal have the blessings of the idTech engine because the engine was built for specific types of games. Same with, say, Codemasters games and the Ego engine. Grid 2 will run on anything that's shat out today, with very low RAM usage to boot. Hell, Dirt Rally 2.0 will run on most things with a decent integrated GPU. The Ego engine was tailor made to work with racing and rally games. 

 

Engines and games that are multi-purpose, especially something like the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine that the Rockstar games use, will always struggle to run better compared to games with a more specific purpose. Grand Theft Auto IV was very much made to run at 30fps, but in that specific game, not much care was put into making it run like that, even on consoles. Midnight Club: Los Angeles, a game that came out only a few months after GTA IV's console releases, adheres to a 30fps cap much, much better than GTA IV ever did. 

RDR2 was largely built, like GTA IV and V, to run at 30fps with an aim for great graphical fidelity. Its PC launch wasn't all that great, true, but it's also a genuinely demanding game. There's a lot of shit the game uses, but there's been care to actually help it run decently and with some optimization aim. It's not nearly as heavy on VRAM usage compared to some games, like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided,  while being significantly more open-ended than that game.

 

Resident Evil 2 and 3 are made to run at 60fps. When games are built to run in a specific way, they tend to not like running in a way that's considerably different to what it's built to run at. Nowadays, most games don't break when running at a higher frame rate compared to how they used to back in the 6th generation era of consoles (play any of the 6th gen GTAs with an uncapped frame rate and see what I'm talking about). 

 

Where your argument kinda comes into shape is the Source engine. Its roots date back to the mid 1990s, with the Source engine itself dating back to late 2000, at the very earliest. Source, before Left 4 Dead, was predominately built to run on one thread. It scales horribly to multiple threads, something that's very easily demonstrable in a bot match in Team Fortress 2. You will drop into the 30s, guaranteed.

But the Source engine has a disadvantage in the fact that it's also segmented at this point in terms of engine revisions; every game before Left 4 Dead (barring Team Fortress 2) runs on a backported version of Source 2013 built on top of their respective Source 2010 updates. CS:GO runs on a more modern chain of Source that does scale considerably better on modern hardware, with some backported features from Source 2. 

I specifically singled out Team Fortress 2 talking about Source 2013 because it's a heavy mishmash of Source 2010 and 2013 at this point, with its roots from Source 2007 showing heavily, specifically in how it handles multi-core processors. The game has been using its own backported menu system for official servers since Meet Your Match in 2016, with some backported features straight out of CS:GO. Essentially, TF2 has bloated to the point where if you play the original version of the game back from late 2007, it runs massively better than how it does currently.

 

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TL;DR: game development is hard and sucks; bloat also takes over engines, in some cases, more than others