Why are pc games not optimised?

[remo233]

I may be really unlucky but most pc games I play have some kind of bug or are not optimised. Will give some examples. Dead space remake, a very cpu intensive game in which I get fps drops when cpu usage is high( have a non k i 9 9900 and cpu usage goes above 90 percent at times) and my fps is in the 60's and 70's. After dying once, fps jumps to 80-90??? Then there is resident evil 4, runs well but sometimes I get a bug where the gpu usage suddenly starts dropping, this is fixed by a pc restart. Diablo 4 is not a demanding game but I have found from watching other youtubers and my own experience, fps is all over the place. Far cry 6 plays best after a pc restart, again a game with many issues reported online of fps drops and heavy cpu usage. I play at 4k ultra without ray tracing and the setting shows that I  am using 9 gb of vram but after playing for a while I get the message that I am runnng out of vram on my rtx 4070 super.  Cyberpunk plays well but phantom liberty has these odd fps drops dring cut scenes. I also own a ps5, I never come across any such issues on there, far cry 6 plays well, have played a number of games on there including resident evil village and all the sony exclusives, never had any such issues.

[HanZie82]

Game making if not a single indie-dev doing it for a hobby, is just a cost/reward game.
They will make the game as good as they can within a certain time/money limit.
Thus optimization is not the highest priority anymore, mostly also because the hardware is just that fast today.

Also "Optimisation" is a really broad term.
There is CPU and GPU cycle optimisation, but also file-size optimization, start up time optimisation and etc.

[remo233]

4 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Game making if not a single indie-dev doing it for a hobby, is just a cost/reward game.
They will make the game as good as they can within a certain time/money limit.
Thus optimization is not the highest priority anymore, mostly also because the hardware is just that fast today.

Also "Optimisation" is a really broad term.
There is CPU and GPU cycle optimisation, but also file-size optimization, start up time optimisation and etc.

Yes but on my ps5, games seem to be optimised well.

[HanZie82]

Just now, remo233 said:

Yes but on my ps5, games seem to be optimised well.

There is only 1 (maybe 2 or 3) different versions of a PS5.
There are technically and factually MILLIONS of variations for PC. So there's that too.

[Eigenvektor]

33 minutes ago, remo233 said:

I may be really unlucky but most pc games I play have some kind of bug or are not optimised.

Playing a bit of devil's advocate: Optimized for what exactly?

 

With a console you have a fixed platform and you have a certain frame rate you want to achieve. This is something you can optimize towards. With PC, you have millions of hardware configurations and people can change a ton of in-game settings. So the only kind of optimization you can really do is: make it run as fast as possible, while using as few resources as possible.

 

But that kind of optimization is costly and effectively never complete, because you'll always find something else that could just be a tiny bit better. So realistically they will target some form of average system that should be able to run the game with certain settings. And I doubt an i9 9900 is at the top of their list anymore.

 

As long as people keep buying these games regardless, there's no real incentive to do better.

[podkall]

9 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Game making if not a single indie-dev doing it for a hobby, is just a cost/reward game.
They will make the game as good as they can within a certain time/money limit.
Thus optimization is not the highest priority anymore, mostly also because the hardware is just that fast today.

cmon @HanZie82, let's not pretend lot of the bad optimization culprits aren't done by teams if not several teams of developers...

 

3 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Playing a bit of devil's advocate: Optimized for what exactly?

I guess the most reasonable thing to ask for, is good enough optimization for average user's level of machine,

 

it's very practical for both, you have an optimized game that runs and isn't known for running terribly on an RTX 4090,

 

and there's less likely chance of people not buying/refunding games, because they are simply pain to run if the person just isn't a type of person who can get a better hardware, or if their hardware is considered mid-tier and higher already..

[TetraSky]

Because they are made with consoles in mind first. Optimizing it for 1 or 2 hardware variant is much easier than doing the same with millions of different ones. Two nearly identical PCs with a motherboard and CPU being different could completely change the way a game is handled by the system.

 

Also because there's "more money" to be made on console than on PC. It's easier to get in console gaming than PC gaming. From a cost and time perspective.

Along with the fact more than a few publishers see PC gamers as second class citizens, because we're all filthy pirates according to them.

[remo233]

6 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Because they are made with consoles in mind first. Optimizing it for 1 or 2 hardware variant is much easier than doing the same with millions of different ones. Two nearly identical PCs with a motherboard and CPU being different could completely change the way a game is handled by the system.

 

Also because there's "more money" to be made on console than on PC. It's easier to get in console gaming than PC gaming. From a cost and time perspective.

Along with the fact more than a few publishers see PC gamers as second class citizens, because we're all filthy pirates according to them.

I have to agree. Batttlefield 2042 plays really well on my pc as long as avoid the pc bottleneck, I belive Battlefield has a large pc player base and is well optimized.

[Eigenvektor]

14 minutes ago, podkall said:

cmon @HanZie82, let's not pretend lot of the bad optimization culprits aren't done by teams if not several teams of developers...

I think you missed their point. A hobby developer who's in it for the love of gaming will spend the time optimizing their game. A big publisher will not, because they are in it for the love of money and any time spent on optimization reduces their bottom line. I'm sure a lot of developers would love to, but they simply aren't allowed to do so.

 

14 minutes ago, podkall said:

I guess the most reasonable thing to ask for, is good enough optimization for average user's level of machine,

How do you define this average system? Does an i9 9900 still qualify as average? And how well should the game run on such a system, is 60 fps good enough? And at what resolution and settings should it be able to achieve this?

 

Don't get me wrong here, there are a ton of issues with a lot of games, but there are also unrealistic expectations on the other side when it comes to what type of fidelity a 5 year old system should be able to achieve or what counts as unoptimized.

[podkall]

27 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

I think you missed their point. A hobby developer who's in it for the love of gaming will spend the time optimizing their game. A big publisher will not, because they are in it for the love of money and any time spent on optimization reduces their bottom line. I'm sure a lot of developers would love to, but they simply aren't allowed to do so.

so they make unoptimized game that requires DLSS upscaling, etc. etc. and then nobody buys it because everyone is still rocking GTX 1070? weird moves by these corpos that can easily afford and wouldn't really cut any losses on doing these things...

 

28 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

How do you define this average system? Does an i9 9900 still qualify as average? And how well should the game run on such a system, is 60 fps good enough? And at what resolution and settings should it be able to achieve this?

possibly i9 of 9th gen, most definitely 60 fps for 60fps locked vsync with decent settings, doesn't have to be Ultra either,

 

even Medium settings can look good,

 

29 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Don't get me wrong here, there are a ton of issues with a lot of games, but there are also unrealistic expectations on the other side when it comes to what type of fidelity a 5 year old system should be able to achieve or what counts as unoptimized.

meh, 5600x (so 5600 can count even though it's 2022 release) is creeping up to be 4 years old, then year later to be 5 years old, and for the performance you get out of it,

 

and then age is relative, how old is 1080Ti? it's quite old, few monts and it's release dates 8 years old, does that mean that it's a bad GPU? no way in hell, 1080 Ti still rocks, only really needs special care because of it's age, but it's feature set allow it to be very stable even in newer titles, first thing coming to my mind is the 11GB VRAM budget, which on some mid-lower-High range cards from Nvidia have the same amount (-1GB)

[HanZie82]

3 hours ago, podkall said:

cmon @HanZie82, let's not pretend lot of the bad optimization culprits aren't done by teams if not several teams of developers...

3 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

I think you missed their point. A hobby developer who's in it for the love of gaming will spend the time optimizing their game. A big publisher will not, because they are in it for the love of money and any time spent on optimization reduces their bottom line. I'm sure a lot of developers would love to, but they simply aren't allowed to do so.

Yup, @Eigenvektoris correct.
I did mean i have more hope for optimisation from indie developers. (if they are in teams or not).
 

2 hours ago, podkall said:

so they make unoptimized game that requires DLSS upscaling, etc. etc. and then nobody buys it because everyone is still rocking GTX 1070? weird moves by these corpos that can easily afford and wouldn't really cut any losses on doing these things...

The big boys, that do it just for the profit or to keep their board (of directors) satisfied, do enough to make it work on most systems that are currently in use.
Simple cost - benefit calculation (for some).
So no they dont do it like you said, but the big corpo's do manage to spend more on research for market demand (or just cheap out and use Steam survey thingy info). Then try and aim to satisfy that as that would result in the best financial gains.
But i tought this was obvious, i guess not. Sorry.


Oh and calm down, if i didnt get this 3060 for free, i'd still be rocking a 1060. And gaming on it too!

[podkall]

9 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Yup, @Eigenvektoris correct.
I did mean i have more hope for optimisation from indie developers. (if they are in teams or not).

noted,

 

10 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

The big boys, that do it just for the profit or to keep their board (of directors) satisfied, do enough to make it work on most systems that are currently in use.
Simple cost - benefit calculation (for some).

too simple calculations, then they wonder why games might suffer from being lower quality than the playerbase would expect it should be,

 

11 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

So no they dont do it like you said, but the big corpo's do manage to spend more on research for market demand (or just cheap out and use Steam survey thingy info). Then try and aim to satisfy that as that would result in the best financial gains.
But i tought this was obvious, i guess not. Sorry.

I mean it's blisteringly obvious that the corpos don't really care by more than general feedback,

 

11 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Oh and calm down, if i didnt get this 3060 for free, i'd still be rocking a 1060. And gaming on it too!

exactly

[HanZie82]

Oh yeah, they dont care.
We gamers/consumers dont matter, just our money matters.

And then they wonder why we dont spend as much of it anymore, if the only thing we can afford is total fucking garbage.

[podkall]

11 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

And then they wonder why we dont spend as much of it anymore, if the only thing we can afford is total fucking garbage.

and,

[demonix00]

5 hours ago, remo233 said:

I also own a ps5, I never come across any such issues on there

That is because the hardware is going to be the same (unless they release a "pro" version that has slightly more power in both processing and graphics) regardless.

 

PCs aren't all the same and game devs are at times lazy when it comes to porting from console to PC even though almost all consoles nowadays use x86/64 architecture.