4 ms·

Unfortunately one of my favorite games of recent time (Total War Attila) is almost incapable of running on my current vanilla setup at decent frame rate (not a

Unfortunately one of my favorite games of recent time (Total War Attila) is almost incapable of running on my current vanilla setup at decent frame rate (not a top of the line gaming PC, but a decent machine with a Ryzen 9 and a 30 series GPU) due to poor optimization and abdonment. The hardware used is years ahead of the game.

sph 5y ago
Same. I got tired of arguing on forums that some games I play are badly optimised, and it's not my $3000 desktop PC the bottleneck, especially when the vast majority play on a thermally constrained laptop. There's some nasty software around that would have issues running on this nitrogen cooled rocket. Good hardware in gaming has somewhat become a waste of money because often the bottleneck is just bad unoptimised code, and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising; meanwhile good game engines (like id Tech) fly on any modern hardware.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  It becomes ever worse on Linux. I remember being basically unable to play native ports, only saved by proton. > and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising hah, when the game in my original post was new I was running it on garbage tier hardware. I got spoiled when I had a top of the line GPU. Nowadays I have to run it like I still have decade old hardware to get decent perf.
- grishka 5y ago
  I do wonder though, if it's so terrible on top of the line hardware, what do these developers test their games on that they run fine for them?
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    After 2 months of crunch time, everyone is like: fuck it, let's ship and go home
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Even amongst fairly involved programmers I'm usually able to find a speedup just by fiddling with the compiler flags, I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. How many Joules have we lost to Microsoft C++ vs. LLVM for example
  - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
    > I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. I worked as a programmer for a AAA game. My feeling is that there needs to be someone in the team with enough influence who cares about optimisation enough to invest a lot of time on it. After working on the game for a while I had enough political budget to spend time fixing ocasional frame stalls that annoyed me, which felt nice. I also worked a bit on general optimisation, but mostly on stalls. There were definitely lots of people who cared about performance, but this probably varies from studio to studio. If I hadn't done this, I'm sure someone else would have fixed some of them, but not necessarily all of them. Let's also remember that lots of teams are under tight pressure and deadlines to deliver features and they may not have time to work on performance even if they want to - and if you're using an external engine, this gets even harder to work on. Anyway, just my 2 cents, maybe other people who were in similar contexts will chime in with their own experiences.
    - nollbit 5y ago
      Another issue with game dev for games that release on PC is that devs are usually on very high-end machines. NVMe RAIDs, 3080's, etc. Great for productivity, but there's very little dog fooding on low-spec machines.
      - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
        That is true. The game I worked on was also on PS4 and Xbox One, which are both somewhat similar in architecture to a PC (at least in terms of CPU performance), just slower. If we could make the game perform well on the XB1, we knew it most likely would do well on PS4 and PC as well. But you're right, there could be PC-specific issues that would only show up on low-spec PCs. In previous console generations things were harder back then as each platform's code was more different than now.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  arma3 - 9 years old - still get 40fps in multiplayer on an RTX2080. Its hilariously badly optimised but so inutterably brilliant that there is nothing* else that compares, it's a genre of 1* - kind of ironic that the game I really look forwards to playing after I upgrade backend of this year next will be a decade old.
  - srer 5y ago
    Much like you I look forward to (mostly CPU) increases to get better arma3 performance! We need all the performance we can get, because even if it was the worlds most optimized engine, we'd just create bigger scenarios. Who wouldn't find a 10,000 unit mission fun, even if it was only at 40fps? :) Inutterably brilliant and a genre of 1, I couldn't agree more.
  - mahesh_rm 5y ago
    arma4 should come up soon
    - xattt 5y ago
      Will there be arma4 on arm64?
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    Just add the DayZ mod and you'll not only be able to enjoy thrilling Zombie survival bugs, but also dreadful 20 FPS :)
moron4hire 5y ago
I don't know anything about that game in particular, but I have experienced extremely poor performance from old games before. Sometimes it can be fixed by installing an old copy of the DirectX 9 runtime. DX9 to DX10 completely changed architectures and eventually (I don't remember when), the old DX9 stuff was reimplemented as being emulated through the newer architecture. But that emulation is extremely inefficient.

sph 5y ago

Same. I got tired of arguing on forums that some games I play are badly optimised, and it's not my $3000 desktop PC the bottleneck, especially when the vast majority play on a thermally constrained laptop. There's some nasty software around that would have issues running on this nitrogen cooled rocket. Good hardware in gaming has somewhat become a waste of money because often the bottleneck is just bad unoptimised code, and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising; meanwhile good game engines (like id Tech) fly on any modern hardware.

the_only_law 5y ago
It becomes ever worse on Linux. I remember being basically unable to play native ports, only saved by proton. > and if you had worse hardware you'd be happier compromising hah, when the game in my original post was new I was running it on garbage tier hardware. I got spoiled when I had a top of the line GPU. Nowadays I have to run it like I still have decade old hardware to get decent perf.
grishka 5y ago
I do wonder though, if it's so terrible on top of the line hardware, what do these developers test their games on that they run fine for them?
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  After 2 months of crunch time, everyone is like: fuck it, let's ship and go home
mhh__ 5y ago
Even amongst fairly involved programmers I'm usually able to find a speedup just by fiddling with the compiler flags, I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. How many Joules have we lost to Microsoft C++ vs. LLVM for example
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago
  > I suspect a lot of games leave a fair amount on the table. I worked as a programmer for a AAA game. My feeling is that there needs to be someone in the team with enough influence who cares about optimisation enough to invest a lot of time on it. After working on the game for a while I had enough political budget to spend time fixing ocasional frame stalls that annoyed me, which felt nice. I also worked a bit on general optimisation, but mostly on stalls. There were definitely lots of people who cared about performance, but this probably varies from studio to studio. If I hadn't done this, I'm sure someone else would have fixed some of them, but not necessarily all of them. Let's also remember that lots of teams are under tight pressure and deadlines to deliver features and they may not have time to work on performance even if they want to - and if you're using an external engine, this gets even harder to work on. Anyway, just my 2 cents, maybe other people who were in similar contexts will chime in with their own experiences.
  - nollbit 5y ago
    Another issue with game dev for games that release on PC is that devs are usually on very high-end machines. NVMe RAIDs, 3080's, etc. Great for productivity, but there's very little dog fooding on low-spec machines.
    - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
      That is true. The game I worked on was also on PS4 and Xbox One, which are both somewhat similar in architecture to a PC (at least in terms of CPU performance), just slower. If we could make the game perform well on the XB1, we knew it most likely would do well on PS4 and PC as well. But you're right, there could be PC-specific issues that would only show up on low-spec PCs. In previous console generations things were harder back then as each platform's code was more different than now.
noir_lord 5y ago
arma3 - 9 years old - still get 40fps in multiplayer on an RTX2080. Its hilariously badly optimised but so inutterably brilliant that there is nothing* else that compares, it's a genre of 1* - kind of ironic that the game I really look forwards to playing after I upgrade backend of this year next will be a decade old.
- srer 5y ago
  Much like you I look forward to (mostly CPU) increases to get better arma3 performance! We need all the performance we can get, because even if it was the worlds most optimized engine, we'd just create bigger scenarios. Who wouldn't find a 10,000 unit mission fun, even if it was only at 40fps? :) Inutterably brilliant and a genre of 1, I couldn't agree more.
- mahesh_rm 5y ago
  arma4 should come up soon
  - xattt 5y ago
    Will there be arma4 on arm64?
- Sebb767 5y ago
  Just add the DayZ mod and you'll not only be able to enjoy thrilling Zombie survival bugs, but also dreadful 20 FPS :)

moron4hire 5y ago

I don't know anything about that game in particular, but I have experienced extremely poor performance from old games before. Sometimes it can be fixed by installing an old copy of the DirectX 9 runtime. DX9 to DX10 completely changed architectures and eventually (I don't remember when), the old DX9 stuff was reimplemented as being emulated through the newer architecture. But that emulation is extremely inefficient.