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> I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever. It could be, if users would have more control over the graphics settings of the games that the
by KronisLV 4y ago
> I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever.
It could be, if users would have more control over the graphics settings of the games that they want to play and they were allowed to scale back further to accommodate older hardware.
For example, the Unity engine by default has a setting to allow downscaling the texture resolution that the game will use 2X, 4X and 8X, yet many games out there actually disable that. Same for some options menus not having framerate limits, dynamic render resolutions (though most engines support that functionality in one way or the other), particle density/soft particle options, options to disable SSAO/HBAO or other post processing like that, as well as enabling/disabling tessellation.
The end result is that many games that could run passably on integrated graphics or hardware from a few generations ago (e.g. GTX 650 Ti) instead struggle greatly, because the people behind the game either didn't care or didn't want to allow it to ever look "bad" in their pursuit of mostly consistent graphical quality (and thus how the game will look in the videos/screenshots out there).
The only real exception to this are e-sports titles, something like CS:GO is optimized really well for performing across a variety of hardware, while also giving the user the controls over how the game will look (and run). Games like DOOM are also a good example, but they're generally the exception, because most don't care about such technical excellence (though it's useful when you try porting the game to something like Nintendo Switch).
Most other games don't give you that ability, just because they try to always do more stuff, which isn't that different from Wirth's law (software gets slower as hardware gets faster). Of course, this is also prevalent in indie titles, many of which don't even have proper LOD setups, because engines like Unity don't automatically generate LOD models and something like Godot 3 didn't even have any sort of LOD functionality out of the box.
Engines like Unreal might make this better with Nanite, except that most people will use it for shoving more details into the games (bloating install sizes a bit), instead of as a really good LOD solution. That said, Godot 4 is also headed in the right direction and even for Godot 3 there are plugins (even though it's just like Unity, where you still need to make the models yourself), for which I actually ported the LOD plugin from GDScript to C#: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/porting-the-godot-lod-plugin-from-gdscript-to-c https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/porting-the-godot-lod-plugi...
- meheleventyone 4y agoHow prevalent is a lack of graphics options really? To me it’s an expected piece of functionality in a PC build and in most games the first place I go to and turn DoF and motion blur off!
- Jochim 4y agoIt's extremely common in PC ports of console exclusives/console first games. If the game is popular then someone usually comes along with a DLL that allows you to tweak at least some of the settings that weren't exposed.
- zbrozek 4y agoI absolutely hate motion blur and depth of field, even if my computer is fast enough to render them.
- KronisLV 4y agoYou'd be surprised. Here's a Wiki that attempts to document various configuration options, tricks and utilities for many games and they have tables with what features are supported in the games that are featured on the site: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_lists#Video https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_lists#Video While it's not an exhaustive list, you can open any of those features and sort the table by whether the game supports the functionality itself, needs some sort of a config/tool fix/hack or does not support in any known way. (the list is so long that you might have to view it with 500 items per page and even then jump through multiple pages, I wonder whether the dataset can have aggregate queries against it done)