Zamana
Member
The surge in hardware prices and launch of an underwhelming PC-lite console (Steam Machine) has hit PC players like a truck. Gone are the days you could easily afford decent hardware that would play games at very respectable settings and still give you stable frames. I'm quite stringent when it comes to my game performance - not the fidelity or frames per second but a stable frame time graph. No stutter, just smooth and stable performance.
Many of us are stuck with relatively old hardware or are waiting for the surges to come down but it may never happen and so we turn to the game developers whose job is to analyse the market and develop their games to cover a wide spectrum of hardware especially low to middle end as most of us can not afford extremely high end GPUs. Steam survey puts the RTX 3060 as the most common card in use with a 6-core CPU and 16GB RAM. This should be the baseline for game developers to focus and the games released should give good frames at decent settings in this hardware.
But it is definitely not so. Look at the list below and pick your developer.
For the prices I pay, you pay, we pay - we expect that the games we buy should run ok but they do not and given the hardware situation I strongly believe its on the gamedevs (and publishers) to give us optimizes games that run well on a spectrum of decent hardware.
P.S: wrote this entire thing myself without AI and I have come to the conclusion that AI assisted writing is actually good lol.
Many of us are stuck with relatively old hardware or are waiting for the surges to come down but it may never happen and so we turn to the game developers whose job is to analyse the market and develop their games to cover a wide spectrum of hardware especially low to middle end as most of us can not afford extremely high end GPUs. Steam survey puts the RTX 3060 as the most common card in use with a 6-core CPU and 16GB RAM. This should be the baseline for game developers to focus and the games released should give good frames at decent settings in this hardware.
But it is definitely not so. Look at the list below and pick your developer.
S Tier
- CAPCOM
Almost every single release since RE7 have been exceptionally well optimized and run flawless in modest hardware while looking excellent. The RE engine continues to improve with RT and PT features and support various upscaling and framegen tech as well. While I agree MH Wilds and Dragon's Dogma 2 were poorly optimised, they are trying and continuing the invest and optimise these games unlike other devs who do not care. You can safely pick a Capcom game and it'll run fine.
- Playground Games
ForzaTech is an incredibly well optimized engine and all the releases look great, feel great, sound great and run extremely well. You could argue that the world isn't dense or their isn't much detail but hey, it's a arcad-ey car game and it runs and the car models look gorgeous and that's all it matters.
- Infinity Ward/Treyarch/Sledgehammer/COD studios
The modified Quake Engine->IW engine has gone through a lot of generations and the current gen engine delivers incredible visuals and fluid gameplay. Most COD games from MW 2019 are extremely well optimized (well given the large budget) and continue delivering stunning blockbuster movide campaigns with crystal clear image quality with various upscaling and RT feature sets. Top Tier optimization.
- DICE/Battlefield
Exceptionally beautiful large scale maps and extremely smooth performance. I am still struck in awe thinking about Star Wars Battlefront 2's, BF1, BF3 campaign levels and the visuals DICE/Frostbite have crafted. Extreme and excellent optimisation.
- id Software
Top Tier optimisations and even with forced RT DOOM DARK Ages runs like a dream on moderate hardware than supports RT. Superbly well tuned FrameGen implementation and all around excellent weight, visuals and sound design with massive maps tied with incredibly satisfying gunplay. One of the best engines out there and one of the best devs that push fidelity and performance twin.
- Kojima Productions
Divisive games but excellent optimization. Since MGSV PP to DS2, Kojima's team pushes visuals and optimizes games to perfection.
A Tier
- Rockstar Games
For consoles, R* is a godly studio somehow optimising extremely complex simulations and massive worlds in low powered consoles however for its PC ports it somehow gets a bit sloppy. The GTA Legacy Remastered Collection is a travesty but I will give it a pass since it was done by Groove Street and not R* (but still R* management thought yeah let's release it). The RDR port is excellent, GTA5 definite edition is also flawless and runs very well. LA Noire PC Port is shit but again co-developed by the dead Team Bondi so it gets a pass. GTA4 PC is ass but fixed by modders. RDR2 has some issues like TAA blur/ghosting and is somewhat unstable, crash heavy. Nothing major though. GTA6 I believe will be extremely well optimized given GTA is THE game the world everyone knows about.
- Most Ubisoft releases
Ubisoft had very rough releases in the past, AC Unity was a national embarassment and till date runs terribly. Far Cry 4 is very badly optimized and FC5/New Dawn uncomfortable heat AMD CPUs (85-90C) due to them boosting very heavily constantly. WD 1 is a very poor PC port and Wildlands performance isn't the best.
However since AC Origins, Ubisoft titles are well optimized. AC Shadows was one of the best if not the best optimized games last year even if it had a lot of heavy next generation features. FC6 runs great on decent hardware. Massive's The Division series runs great and their single player experiences: Avatar and Star Wars boast incredible visuals with very stable and are very optimised for the massively detailed world they present. Prince of Persia (the metroidvania) is extremely well optimised and even runs in some integrated GPUs. Overall Ubisoft has been delivering extremely pretty games which are also well optimised. They also do NOT give up and keep improving their games which were badly at release such as Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Crew, Star Wars, Avatar, Division 2.
- CD Project Red
Cyberpunk 2077 was a disastrous launch but the renlentless updates and care to it is respectable. CDPR has turned Cyberpunk into one of the most loved games and also is extremely good looking and still is being used as a benchmark 6 years later. One of the first games to feature Path Tracing and at max settings this game still blows most releases of today. Witcher 3 too has got an engine upgrade and even is getting a DLC and they keep pushing technology and graphics further and so easily A tier but deep down you know they are S.
- IO Interactive
Very impressive optimization and visuals in Hitman WOA but First Light suffers from bad DLSS implementation and explosions/particles are not CPU optimised. Still good dev, good games and decent to good optimisation.
- Most ports of Sony Games (mixed)
Nixxes ports are A-tier to S-tier: Spiderman, TLoU2, both Horizon games, Helldivers, Ghost of Tshushima are well optimized and runs beautiful with stable, locked frametimes. Helldivers 2 is one of the standouts, the port has been very well optimised by NIXXES. Iron Galaxy did the Uncharted 4 PC port very well however the TLoU Part 1 port was pretty bad. Climax's Returnal port has memory leak. GoW ports by Jetpack are very well made.
B Tier
- Bethesda Studios (and its subsidiaries Arkane, MachineGames)
Mostly buggy releases but mostly fixed latter by themselves or modders. The custom creation engine in Starfield has one of the best FrameGen implementations I have ever used and the ligtening with volumtrics and shadows creates very atmospheric and clean visuals. The ProcGen planet system is also very good and VRAM management is extremely well optimised. However Starfield still doesn't run well in big areas like New Atlantis and when there is a lot of complex simulations. The engine has not made efforts to be next-gen but it works fine. I'm also particulary pissed about this studio because it has left a very memorable and special game (Oblivion Remastered) without any updates for a year and that game runs horrible.
Arkane Studios: The custom VOID engine (fork of idTech) has quite a bit of stutter issues as seen in Dishonored 2, Prey and Deathloop. MachineGames: great performance given its idTech but poor accessibility settings: no option to turn off screen shake/camera shake and VRAM issues in Indiana Jones.
- Techland
Dying Light 1 looks great but has poor AA implementation and exposure settings but the gameplay is excellent. D2 had a lot of bugs and visually wasn't that impressive but it ran alright, Beast is well optimized and runs and looks great but nothing groundbreaking. While competent they don't really push for high fidelity graphics/RT.
- Asobo
Plague Tale games while they look good they run quite badly and have little to no accessibility options like FOV/post-processing stuff etc. Asobo still I believe is an incredible developer because it made and makes MS Flight Simulator (which is a stunning) although with MS help.
- FROMSOFT
Boss design, artstyle, world building and combat are worldclass and industry leading but the technical performance and visuals are passable. ER had stutter problems. All FromSoft games (apart from AC6) sadly are locked at 60fps only and I really hope FromSoft makes advancements to its engine for higher frames as these games will feel incredible at higher frames. Also no FOV slider and requires mods but mods disable online play. Frustrating.
C-Tier
- ATLUS
P3R? UE4 with RT reflections that stutter and no speed selection for battles. P5R? runs bad at higher image scales for a game that really shouldn't need that much power. Metaphor? Dogshit AA and performance and heavy given how bad it looks. Requires upscaling + VULKAN to get good frames lol.
- Koei Tecmo/Team Ninja/Omega Force
Very dissapointing to put these devs here because I really, really enjoy their games, the system, art, sound and mechanics are great and fluid but they make dogshit ports. The Katana Engine is still stuck in the PS4 generation and almost every PC release runs badly. This hurts a lot because I don't care if a bad game runs bad but if a fun, exciting and enjoyable games runs badly, it's just a waste of talent. Nioh 1 stutters if you have no controller connected, Nioh 2 particles have heavy FPS drops, Wo Long has stuttering issues that are largely fixed by now, Rise of the Ronin is heavily CPU bound in cities and it looks a generation or two below AC Shadows and runs worse. Wild Hearts has a forever stutter issue while traversing and hunting big monsters and such a shame that it was abandoned given how much fun the mechanics are and finally FF: Stranger of Paradise has a slow-mo effect when soul-burst and the runs bad given how terribly washed it looks. Very dissapointing and bad PC ports.
- Gearbox
Similar above, great games, excellent gunplay and the pioneers of the looter-shooter genre. The performance of all Borderland games have been bad. BL1: stutters a bit and has no camera shake options, BL2: heavy fps drops due to old PhyX and physics, no camera shake options. BL3: finally camera shake toggle but again to get it running you need to manually add stuff in the engine.ini and disable some Win features, same with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. B4: lmao, don't even speak about the optimisation but has the greatest gameplay in the series and it's really fun when it runs well.
F-Tier
- Obsidian Entertainment
They do not know or care about optimisation. PoE1, 2 run badly even though they are cRPGs (fixed by using Smooth Motion). Avowed runs like shit. Outer Worlds 1 runs bad. Outer Worlds 2 also runs very poorly. Good, fun games but really badly optimised.
- Square Enix
Squenix gives zero fucks about PC. Almost every game I have played ran bad. FF7 & Rebirth have VRAM/texture issues and stutter. Octopath 1/2 have bloom/DoF issues. No toggle to sprint as well. FF16 runs bad. FF15 runs bad. Forspoken runs bad.
- GSC Game World
Hurts to put them here but the old Stalkers games till date run like shit. The remastered onces also run badly but are decent now after many patches. STALKER 2 while visually impressive and incredibly atmospheric and fun to play is quite badly optimised. Especially in villages you get heavy CPU bottlenecks and a lot stutter. You also need to play this upscaled as the TAA implementation is pretty bad, blurry trees and image. So upscaled + DLAA + FG to get nice, clean, sharp image but at the cost of bad performance and frames.
- Bloober Team
This one hurts because I want to play these games but the performance is bad for decent hardware. SH2 has animation frame stutter which is impossible to remove check DF video, Cronos doesn't run on 8GB cards. These devs do the bare minumum in optimisation and just get their games out.
For the prices I pay, you pay, we pay - we expect that the games we buy should run ok but they do not and given the hardware situation I strongly believe its on the gamedevs (and publishers) to give us optimizes games that run well on a spectrum of decent hardware.
P.S: wrote this entire thing myself without AI and I have come to the conclusion that AI assisted writing is actually good lol.
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