[Saka]

In Febuary dozens of disappointed fans complained about notorious stuttering in Hogwarts Legacy. Soon after it turned out the game was consuming humongous amounts of RAM, and if the system did not have enough (circa 25GB was the cut-off) the performance in the game would suffer even with otherwise good hardware. It's unfortunate, as many fans of the franchise are not necessarily hardware geeks and premade builds or laptops are still not sold with 32GB as standard, at least not DDR4.

Then there was Kerbal Space Program 2 requiring a computer from NASA to actually play the game. Though, it doesn't come as a big shock, as its predecessor was known for notoriously bad performance.


@DoctorEldritch posted a while ago wondering what was up with The Last of Us Part 1. The game got flooded by negative reviews, rightfully so, for its atrocious performance. It was hailed the worst port ever by the media.



In the upcoming releases there's the Gollum game that I was interested in. It only took me a glance at the minimum and recommended specs. Now I don't want to play it anymore. I would have to play it at 720p to get anything better than a slideshow, unless the developers would actually improve the performance. Credit to our Legion lavaswimmer for the picture.



And now there's an uproar on Reddit about Jedi: Survivor and its inability to run decently on a RTX 4090 card. If it can't play smoothly on the highest end gaming GPU available, then what of the people who don't even have that? Likely even a NASA computer wouldn't run this game well, but maybe a computer from 2 years in the future.



I thought, it could be interesting to discuss this topic; why it happens and what people in the community think about it. Are the issues with these games relevant to them?

[GoLLuM13]

Nice topic @Saka bad port to PC isn't new (hello Arkham Knight) and actually I'm seeing 2 phenomenons in new games that make them ask for crazy rigs.
1- Deadlines that put a hell of pressure on devs and/or just lazy devs or a not that good team (not to say incompetent that would be disrespectful like some games are to customers 👀) sometimes I feel like marketing is superior to the quality of the product and if we have to do updates we'll do it, this is why day one updates are so common too.
2- The new gen, we all heard about the superfast SSDs on the new gen consoles (especially on the PS5) and while we already have superfast SSDs on PC they aren't / weren't that fast and as you may know the communication between the different components isn't as fast as on console this is why we now have DirectStorage, while some games use it (it's still relatively new and not very well optimized) it's still not totally on point, and you see me coming, this is why we have those huge amounts of RAM (and VRAM in some cases) that are asked to play the game, to substitute the superfast SSD by superfast RAM.

While it explains a part of the story, it doesn't excuse the bad optimization and the choices of companies like nVidia to give the DLSS3 to RTX40 only when we saw that RTX 30 and RTX 20 are capable to use it

So I guess that things will probably be better when fast nVME SSDs will be more spread across players and DirectStorage will be more mature

PS: I might have forgotten a detail or two, my apologies 👀

[Saka]

Oh yes, sorry excuses of ports have been a problem for a long time. But this requirement of hardware not yet on the market to run the game smoothly at high resolution is rather new.

I have a suspicion nVidia has a part in this problem, at least by pushing DLSS so aggressively. Upscaling on its own is great, but it should not be used as a baseline to run a game on high end hardware. Even middle rank hardware should be able to handle more than just 1080p. Not max settings, but decent 1440p experience with the fancy whistles disabled shouldn't be too much to ask in the current year. Then, who knows, maybe the devs are also told not to bother too much with optimization because cards are not selling too well...

The speed of the SSD shouldn't be an issue if the ports were actually made taking hardware differences into consideration. But I guess it's much faster to minimize the changes and dump the data in the runtime memory rather than make workarounds to reduce the impact of slower texture loading etc.

Myself, I am just not excited to play the games if they are going to perform like a Powerpoint slideshow on my hardware. I am too old to watch single digit fps and my eyes get strained easily.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Thank you for the topic indeed and thank you @GoLLuM13 for the detailed reply. Those reasons may be true, but what worries me most is this being an emerging thread. Like @Saka said wrote, from Hogwarts Legacy, it's been gaining momentum and seems like every big release, KSP 2 notwithstanding (sorry KSP 2 fans, do we have any?) has this problem.

Which makes it a pattern, and an unfortunate one at that. So what worries me most is the reaction it may cause. @Saka shared she may not want to play Gollum anymore, and she is likely not the only one. So what would happen, will there be a migration of gamer preference towards less graphic and demanding indie games? Or maybe one big developer will see it as an opportunity to beat the competition by making a port that would actually be good and in that reverse the trend? Or maybe the industry could come up with an accepted porting standard for games (likely won't happen, but would be good, would it not?) It would really be bad if the practice became a common norm.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch like we say "never say never" but I really doubt that a "big" dev will change anything right now. Why ? Because multiplatform games are thought for consoles before anything else (which means before PCs) and also because we are in a transitional period where we are going to the new gen of consoles which, for the first times, has put the SSD in its core, for example we don't have the redundant assets they used to do to accelerate the loading of textures because of the different nature of storage, we don't have or barely have loading screens between two different areas of a map or two different worlds (like in Ratchet & Clank or Spider-Man on PS5 for example or even Medium on Xbox Series), they also don't have to use those tricks like, discussing in an elevator or like in Resident Evil the opening door animation to load the new room ... etc, but PCs aren't there yet, some people are still using HDDs 👀 while it's compatible with DirectStorage it's not fast enough to rivalize with new gen consoles (same with 2.5 SATA SSDs even if it's way better than an HDD) and when you know that Microsoft required or will require this year to their partners (PC OEMs) to have machines with SSDs (most probably NVME when we see how things are going) I think in a near future NVME SSDs will be the norm and not the exception and that's the moment where we will enjoy those games we used to be disgusted to try because of these hardware limitations. That being said, I insist that a low framerate on a muscle rocket machine with an M.2 SSD on PCIE 4.0 or 5.0 with an RTX 4090 that barely "works" while it flies on a console is due to a very bad optimization. I get it that we only have like 3 different hardware on consoles, which makes it easy to optimize, but there's absolutely no excuse to have 13 fps on an RTX 4090 👀

[Saka]

State of PC AAA Gaming in 2023:



EA shared a statement on their Twitter. Now, question is what they consider "lower performing CPUs", because if they meant previous generation top-of-the-line CPUs, that's definitely not okay.

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 I hope you're right and soon the gap between PCs and consoles will narrow, but I wonder why developers would not postpone PC launches in the first place. Like what happened with Horizon: Zero Dawn - the game did not get to PC for quite a while after the console release. Granted, when it did get there, it was not well-ported either. But Horizon: Forbidden West does the same - no PC release for at least 2 years.

I am fine with waiting for a while to get a game that works well, and would personally prefer to get a "good working game tomorrow rather than a broken game today". And I would think bad publicity and reputation loss from the company apologizing for releasing a bad product, like in that message @Saka shared, would actually be more harmful than the company saying "We're sorry, the optimization and porting needs additional work, so please bear with us for another year while we're making sure it will work". This is the reasoning I can understand, at least.

As it is now, it seems that developers are greedy and want to get a quick buck. This may be just as well, as the projects they are releasing are big with limited competition. Postponing the PC release would lose them some money immediately, but would help to save face and would actually give some time for the PC to catch up to the console one.

But those are just my ramblings from someone who is not involved in the inner workings of game release. Who knows what they actually think? And from what @Saka shared, 2023 hs not been a good year so far indeed.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch Sony is the exception they keep the exclusivity of their games for X months/years some of the game we can discover on PC weren't even supposed to be launched on PC on the first place, this is why there is this gap of time. And the reasond why others don't postpone the launch of their games is simple, if they don't people will lose interest (without mentioning the risk of being spoiled if it's a solo game) and also to satisfy shareholders, remember that they're the ones who decide what things should be done and when they should be, but then, they can postpone on all platforms for like some weeks or months to be sure the PC port is descent and playable at least.

If you read carefully, they're giving excuses more than apologies, they blame Windows 10 (yeah sure 🤣) and they had the courage to say something like "...Star Wars Jedi : Survivor is not performing to our standards... in particular those with high-end machines..." seriously ? What more than a high-end machine do they need ? @Saka a technical question you might be able to answer, I don't know if it's beyond my knowledge or is it a language thing, but what is a "multithreaded chipset" ? I never heard of it, I know what is a multithreaded Chip/CPU but not chipset 👀

And to get back to the subject, developers but mostly publishers were, are and will always be greedy, let's not forget their main purpose is to "generate" cash this is business after all 👀

But yeah 2023 is seeing very good titles as long as we are on console, but again one of the biggest and richest publishers (Activision) with its golden license Call of Duty still has bugs on Modern Warfare II (2022) that were already there in Modern Warfare (2019) at least, and yes they were also on the two games between them (Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard) 👀 So as long as they know people will buy no matter what, they'll keep doing it this way 👀

[Saka]

@GoLLuM13 I would hazard a guess that they meant AMD's multi-die processors which can suffer from the Windows task scheduler putting processes on the wrong die, causing increased latency. Ideally, processes from the same software should be ran on the same die to minimise the latency between the cores.

However, that's just a bullshit excuse as these products can still achieve excellent performance in games and workarounds for the scheduler problem exist, such as Process Lasso.

Hopefully that wasn't too technical. I am also feeling mildly tipsy from celebrating Vappu. 😂

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 This whole situation reminds me a bit of what happened to Disney over the years. Granted, I will oversimplify this to an unbecoming degree, as the whole situation, as always, is much more complex than initially appears. But I am reminded of 2 quotes. The first one is by Walt Disney himself:

“We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”

And then there is one from an infamous internal memo of Disney's then-CEO Michael Eisner:

“We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement. We must always make entertaining movies, and, if we make entertaining movies, at times, we will reliably make history, art, a statement or all three.

We cannot expect numerous hits, but if every film has an original and imaginative concept, then we can be confident that something will break through.”

Seems that a similar shift is happening in the gaming industry on a higher scale, at least as far as big companies seem to operate.
@Saka gets kudos for being able to answer technical questions while mildly inebriated. I can't do that even sober.