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Horizon Zero Dawn for PC confirms poor ports will run poorly on PC

geordiemp

Member
It's not an excuse to deliver such a shitty port. I can't imagine it being harder than going from DX12 to Vulkan. Many devs have succeeded in this.

Do you think dreams would also be a straight easy port.

GPGPU low level stuff is not so easy to make platform agnostic. Its not about high level apis.

It will get worse on ps5.

It is not so simple as a poor port, sony console first party in particular do very custom low level stuff and you know this.
 
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They had to be on crack, most games out there perform similar on PC hardware that is close to consoles parts (sometimes even better).
This is not exactly the case, but their comments are mostly if not only about the fixed platform benefits aka exclusives. Multiplatforms are not that optimized for the console hardware as exclusives are of course(not even close actually), but again most of the time they perform better compared to the same pc hardware. You have to find the equivalent to that jaguar to be fair.

Either way, they have better knowledge about gaming hardware than me and you, and they are mostly pc devs. So how the crack tastes? :p
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
W
Isn't it great to have 3 hours of free time to make a wall of text about why a shit port runs like trash but come to a wrong conclusion.
With PC gaming You get used to wasting time since You waste so much of it on troubleshooting and testing all settings. If the game does not outright work 60fps on your pc on good settings, then You need to find good lower settings... You install drivers, msi afterburner to monitors fps, You take screenshots to compare settings. Minutes turn into hours, hours turn into days. Then You realize, that half of the doom3 launch, You spent testing and setting the game. Same with most major pc releases sadly.... I know because I am 31 and I am a pc gamer since... since always.
I love pc gaming and it's main strength is the fact that I CAN set everything I want but that's also it's main drawback in some way. Having the best hardware available at the time vastly reduces problems encountered. Having freesync display also let's me neglect frops in 40-60 range on 4k display so it's way better than it was in the past
 

Kataploom

Gold Member
If only we had low-level graphic APIs like DX12 and Vulkan... WAIT, DID I JUST NAME TWO? Oh, well, there you go... no more big performance advantage on consoles over PC at same specs I guess.

OT: Haven't played it yet but it all seems like a very cheap effort. Not gonna blame devs, programming is HARD, I'm gonna blame Sony execution of the project, which, btw, I would say this absurd discussion is something they wanted.
 

The_Mike

I cry about SonyGaf from my chair in Redmond, WA
W

With PC gaming You get used to wasting time since You waste so much of it on troubleshooting and testing all settings. If the game does not outright work 60fps on your pc on good settings, then You need to find good lower settings... You install drivers, msi afterburner to monitors fps, You take screenshots to compare settings. Minutes turn into hours, hours turn into days. Then You realize, that half of the doom3 launch, You spent testing and setting the game. Same with most major pc releases sadly.... I know because I am 31 and I am a pc gamer since... since always.
I love pc gaming and it's main strength is the fact that I CAN set everything I want but that's also it's main drawback in some way. Having the best hardware available at the time vastly reduces problems encountered. Having freesync display also let's me neglect frops in 40-60 range on 4k display so it's way better than it was in the past

Honk post of the day.
 
W

With PC gaming You get used to wasting time since You waste so much of it on troubleshooting and testing all settings. If the game does not outright work 60fps on your pc on good settings, then You need to find good lower settings... You install drivers, msi afterburner to monitors fps, You take screenshots to compare settings. Minutes turn into hours, hours turn into days. Then You realize, that half of the doom3 launch, You spent testing and setting the game. Same with most major pc releases sadly.... I know because I am 31 and I am a pc gamer since... since always.
I love pc gaming and it's main strength is the fact that I CAN set everything I want but that's also it's main drawback in some way. Having the best hardware available at the time vastly reduces problems encountered. Having freesync display also let's me neglect frops in 40-60 range on 4k display so it's way better than it was in the past

You're doing it wrong, especially if you have powerful hardware.
 

geordiemp

Member
I have seen it already and read the PDFs back in 2017 I think.

Its not new, how that low level coding translates from a specfic console code to abstract DX12 api we will not know.....until a dev tells us.

It depends if all the code is running on GPU and using caches, and pC has to use CPU and memory which will be 100s or more times latent.....then it could run really shit.

But calling it crap (thread title) is also reaching.
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
You're doing it wrong, especially if you have powerful hardware.
Nah it's all fine now. I have 3700x/rtx 2070 with 4k freesync monitor. It's a great setup and I don't really have much problems nowadays. But this does not mean that consoles are bad. The damn ps4 slim is 200usd and I played Death Stranding on it year ago and had a great, trouble free time.
I will replay in 4k60 on pc probably in winter.
That said - You always do some surplus work with pc gaming. Even with great hardware or if You are ignorant, you play with shit settings, no freesync, af etc
 
Its not new, how that low level coding translates from a specfic console code to abstract DX12 api we will not know.....until a dev tells us.

It depends if all the code is running on GPU and using caches, and pC has to use CPU and memory which will be 100s or more times latent.....then it could run really shit.

But calling it crap is also reaching.
I have never disagreed with you or I did? :p
 

psorcerer

Banned
You don't need unified memory to have proper synchronization

You do. GPU cannot write to system RAM.
To sync with GPU you need to periodically check a port write on a VMEM-mapped port and then initiate a DMA copy of VRAM->RAM.
Both of these are pretty costly operations.
On PS4 you don't need to do anything other than checking the port, and port is locally-mapped too, so you can actually sync implicitly by knowing the GPU state (if you always put commands in command buffer "manually", which is impossible on PC too, at all)
 
Do you think dreams would also be a straight easy port.

GPGPU low level stuff is not so easy to make platform agnostic. Its not about high level apis.

It will get worse on ps5.

It is not so simple as a poor port, sony console first party in particular do very custom low level stuff and you know this.

Well how about the start doing proper development planning and use a bit of foresight before coding in such a way that hampers your ability to port to a system that is around 60-75% similar to it in every way?

Either that it’s just piss poor compatibility with porting which itself, is not good for a “professional” dev studio.

At the end of the day, their reputation will take a hit for this regardless of the excuses made for a less than stellar job.
 

geordiemp

Member
Well how about the start doing proper development planning and use a bit of foresight before coding in such a way that hampers your ability to port to a system that is around 60-75% similar to it in every way?

Either that it’s just piss poor compatibility with porting which itself, is not good for a “professional” dev studio.

At the end of the day, their reputation will take a hit for this regardless of the excuses made for a less than stellar job.

Well you have bean counters who do the marketing and business strategy, and engineers and devs who know how shit works.

Why Sony picked one of the most complex game to port who knows, bet some of the decuma engine devs where sneakily smiling.

Sony testing the water on PC market, engineers throw in spanner maybe ? Who knows, funny though.
 
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FranXico

Member
Do you think dreams would also be a straight easy port.

GPGPU low level stuff is not so easy to make platform agnostic. Its not about high level apis.

It will get worse on ps5.

It is not so simple as a poor port, sony console first party in particular do very custom low level stuff and you know this.
Nobody said it would be easy. But if one waits so long to port a game to PC, might as well take the time to do it right, instead of delivering what was released.

Death Stranding was well ported to PC.
 

geordiemp

Member
Nobody said it would be easy. But if one waits so long to port a game to PC, might as well take the time to do it right, instead of delivering what was released.

Death Stranding was well ported to PC.

And why pick the game with GPGPU procedural generation, HZD and Dreams would be most difficult. See above for a wild guess, but its speculation time.

Sony testing PC waters, cost of outsourcing first party game, profit after steam store %, amount of illegal copying.

Maybe not everyone at Sony wanted a smooth PC transition....? Nobody knows...
 
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psorcerer

Banned
Why pick the difficult one ?

It wasn't difficult.
Decima already had PC support. And was an engine.
But HZD was created for one platform only, and thus extremely hard to port.
Compared to TLOU2 which was a) created for one platform b) didn't have any PC support c) has no engine - it's a pretty "easy" port.
 
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theclaw135

Banned
Wouldn't consoles have more efficient architectures too? Even if x86 based, they can use a leaner derivative of the instruction set.
A console has absolutely zero need for compatibility stretching back to the 8088/8086.
 
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nemiroff

Gold Member
You cannot compare PC specs with console specs.
Consoles are dedicated to gaming and they all have the same specs, so developers can put those resources to good use.
On PC you need more power to achieve the same results

Yeah that's true; you need about one percent more power to take care of the overhead. Also, I have an idea to developers; How about you make it possible to adjust graphical settings inside the game, that way we can tune the results independent on all the different PC specifications out there, and developers can put those resources to good use instead of depending on the lowest common denominator. I wonder why no one has thought about that before.
 

GymWolf

Member
That title change tho

spn_dean-chef-kiss.gif
 
But also, I also do think it's a mixture of a poor port and also that the PS4 version is using the hardware much better.

Indeed, but taking into consideration that they produced -not many months before-a very good port with Decima engine, one could expect an even better HZD port.

So I think is more of the latter(bold). Death stranding was announced for both platforms.

I don't know why they changed the title if the OP wanted to share a specific opinion. This is at least disrespectful.
 
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martino

Member
it's clear this game should have released later when you see the "semi offficial" list of bugs (semi official because dev themselves link it ) :

 
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Guilty_AI

Member
But also, I also do think it's a mixture of a poor port and also that the PS4 version is using the hardware much better.
Its probably more like they never expected to make a port so they never developed the game accordingly.

When making a multiplatform software its important to follow certain standards and good practices that allow the program to be ported and to run on different hardware more easily. When developing for a single hardware, its easier to fall into a "whatever works/GoHorse" mentality, especially if the team is dealing with crunch and tight deadlines.

I don't know if that was the case here, but we can see traces of that inproper development mentality within the game, like how aloy's hair physics is tied to framerate, or how the game has terrible performance when trying to run it over 30fps, memory leaks, all the crashes and instability issues.
 
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I ended up getting a refund for the game...Had barely played it, cause whenever I would launch it..it would do that super slow "Optimization" thing all over again, and my saves would be deleted. Maybe after like 10 patches and a sale i'll come back to it, but this was a horrible port that goes beyond just the problems with the rendering/graphics/frame drops etc...seems a bit rushed altogether IMO..I wanted to play through the whole thing and then finally do the DLC...but I guess ima boot the ol ps4 pro up(I already beat the main game on there) and run through the DLC that way smh
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
Captain obvious?

Carmack: Consoles run 2x or so better than equal PC hardware, but it isn’t just API in the way, focus a single spec also matters.

Oles Shishkovtsov: You just cannot compare consoles to PC directly. Consoles could do at least 2x what a comparable PC can due to the fixed platform and low-level access to hardware. (Devs with mainly pc history)

Eh, consoles aren’t what they used to be. Older consoles console had custom designed and optimized hardware explicitly for gaming, and the games were written in low level langurges. But these days, consoles are basically running PC hardware, with the same APIs as the PC games. They use engines designed to be cross platform. And this move towards commoditization of consoles and development makes sense in a booming market, especially when PC hardware has gotten so much more power and flexible than it used to be. You don’t need to build your own solution to push triangles at a given price point (such as PS1) when AMD can just sell you what they have.

The performance of HZD does disappoint but I still think overall the consoles aren’t showing us any secret sauce and I think that will be the case going forward, even more so than it is now.
 
okay so here is comming more of the same ;)

here a fx 8300 and a GTX 960 ( 2,4 Tf) runs Detroid Become Human worse than PS4 while using the same settings. Framrate lingers around 30 but with many dips below 30 even in non action scenes.



and how about something very recent - the Avengers Beta. And dont come me with ,,oh its a beta things can change" because even if this is true - It would count also for PS4 version
and Digital Foundry also dicided to test all systems on it anyway

So here we have the FX 8300 and a 4GB Version of the RX 460 barely holding 30FPS even in Low Settings. DF did confirm in their PS4 Video already that PS4 uses a High Medium Mix


keep in mind that Avengers uses on PS4 also a DS wich according to DF resides most of its time at 1080p so i would assume that factors not as much here..


And again Death Stranding does not stress the PS4 Hardware like HZD did - so if theres headroom we should naturaly see the same headroom in its PC Port wich we do. One must be totaly ignorant to deny that Death Stranding MUST be way easier on any Hardware than HZD... even the super simple Fact that you see more of the Sky all the time (since no Foliage\ Trees to draw) should and would translate to less fillrate ...
Also many of you seem just to ignore what an impact PS4 low level API GNM has. People simply dont know how much worse DX 12 let alone DX11 makes use of Hardware because it uses fixed paths and fixed solutions for most problems.
Programming for GNM means writing all stuff by yourself it means much more work . But the result is usually a better render pipeline because you can approach Hardware directly instead of using schematics wich have a general purpose approach to hardware.
Some Developers did not even know how to use such a low level API.

That this assessment is true shows this early Piece from DF were they interviewd Ubisofts Reflection team on how they portet "the Crew" to PS4 from its Windows version. Many intresting Infos there regarding our topic here

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-crew-was-ported-to-playstation-4

Most people start with the GNMX API which wraps around GNM and manages the more esoteric GPU details in a way that's a lot more familiar if you're used to platforms like D3D11. We started with the high-level one but eventually we moved to the low-level API because it suits our uses a little better," says O'Connor, explaining that while GNMX is a lot simpler to work with, it removes much of the custom access to the PS4 GPU, and also incurs a significant CPU hit.

This Quote up there is the writen explanation why PS4 Exclusives managed to look and perform better through the whole Generation than the Third party Titels with the highest Produktion Values.

We can all agree that HZD has some issues .. but i dont believe that its performance is a part of that. What we see is code that was originally meant to run on a way more efficient hardware with use of HSA and its hUMA Layout. And it all was coded to make maximum use of a true low level API (unlike DX12 or even Vulcan). Putting that to PC means getting it delivered throu a gearbox wich slows that code down. You can optimize of course but only so much. And that is not a take against PC - PC will have always the longer handle - simply bye being able to customize its hardware and brute force.
 
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Eh, consoles aren’t what they used to be. Older consoles console had custom designed

The second dev's comment was about current-gen aka ps4/one.
And current-gen is the most ''basic'' console generation ever. Developing on a fixed platform brings always an advantage.


I think that will be the case going forward, even more so than it is now.

Next-gen will be way more ''custom'' oriented than the current-gen and as custom-designed(if not more) as the generation Carmack referred to, PS3/360).

Custom RDNA 2, custom features that they wanted to include, custom CPU, custom I/O which makes the already ultra-fast SSD (custom SSD) perform without any bottlenecks, etc.

Of course, if they follow a day one multiplatform strategy, any of these have no reason to exist and we will never see their potential outcomes.

Thats why I believe they will not do it(day one at least for their big guns aka ultra optimised games for the platform)

I suggest you to watch '' The road to PS5''
 
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Spaceman292

Banned
Two cases:

1: you're arguing that PS4 runs the game better than a PC with a similar hardware configuration as the console, in which case it's a no-brainer and you didn't need to write a wall of text for it. PCs are less specialized machines and a PC with a similar hardware configuration as a PS4 would be considered a piece of junk nowadays for gaming.

2: you're arguing that consoles have an edge over PC in general, in which case this is a terrible take. This is simply a very badly optimized port and Death Stranding, running on the same engine, proves you wrong.
Wow that thread ended quickly
 
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