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The fact that running a game at almost 720p and hitting 30fps in demanding areas with high-end last-gen hardware is slightly concerning. Are developers not opti

The fact that running a game at almost 720p and hitting 30fps in demanding areas with high-end last-gen hardware is slightly concerning. Are developers not optimizing their games anymore?

wincy 3y ago
I think it’s just the reality of how many bells and whistles there are, especially with ray tracing. It looks really good, it doesn’t seem unoptimized (generally you’d expect weird hitches in stuff like that, I definitely noticed that in Baldur’s Gate 3 with lighting effects) there’s a sumptuousness and wetness and warmth in all the right places to the environments that really feel like you’re walking along a path at sunset in an old growth forest. The feature sets involving AI in the newest cards are really the key, I think, and why my last gen premium card is lagging behind. DLSS 2.0 on the 4080 and 4090 especially are just revolutionary in how they work. The last gen cards just can’t quite keep up. It’s like magic, making frames out of seemingly thin air. In my opinion this is a good problem to have! I’d rather have games pushing the state of the art than sticking to what the PS5 and Xbox whatever it’s called these days can do.
supertrope 3y ago
Video games are slapped together because deadlines must be hit. The most popular titles can cost >$100 million to produce so there is huge pressure to get it out the door. Customers expect cutting edge graphics which contributes to production budget bloat (so does marketing). A lot of PC games are console first and ported over. The new console generation (PS5) means more VRAM is available so games expand to fill it. Just like how Blu-ray was a large increase over DVD capacity. Later 50GB was a ceiling commonly bumped up against. Once 50GB was exceeded why not have a 100GB install size since you’ve blown past the Blu-ray limit anyway?
- zirgs 3y ago
  This is not true about AW2 though - it's pretty clear that it's a PC-first title. Consoles run the game at medium-low settings. Max settings are for future PCs. Even the 4090 can't run it @ native 4k 60 fps with everything maxed out.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
The comment mentions they're running at max settings. So even current-gen high-end hardware might not be the target. As long as the lower settings scale down fine to lower end hardware, who cares about max settings? That's what the original article is about. Max settings also means enabled path tracing, which current-gen Nvidia's 4000 series have better hardware acceleration for. So you can't really compare performance to previous hardware which don't have that hardware acceleration. No amount of optimization is going to fix that, and it should probably be turned off if you're not on a 4000 series or newer card. In that same way, AMD's path tracing hardware acceleration falls behind Nvidia's. A current-gen high-end AMD RX 7900 XTX does worse than Nvidia's last-gen not as high-end 3070 in Cyberpunk 2077's path tracing update. https://youtu.be/cSq2WoARtyM?t=503 https://youtu.be/cSq2WoARtyM?t=503
doikor 3y ago
It is actually quite well optimised. It is one of the best looking video games ever made. Maxing everything means enabling path tracing which is a massive performance hit. Basically to do that you need a 4090 or a cheaper 40xx card and use frame generation. The “PS5/Series X equivalent” settings are a mixture of low/medium without any hardware ray tracing (I think it still does some software ray tracing similar to UE5 Lumen) using FSR2 with post processing effects done before the upscaling (low resolution). On PC if you use high post processing effects they happen after the upscaling and thus at much higher resolution (this is the “heaviest” option outside of the ray tracing stuff) Remedy hasn’t made a game that targets “native” resolution since Max Payne 2. Basically starting with the first Alan Wake game they have used lower internal resolutions and used the budget for other graphical effects. (On PC you still always had the option to use native resolution)

The fact that running a game at almost 720p and hitting 30fps in demanding areas with high-end last-gen hardware is slightly concerning. Are developers not optimizing their games anymore?

wincy 3y ago

I think it’s just the reality of how many bells and whistles there are, especially with ray tracing. It looks really good, it doesn’t seem unoptimized (generally you’d expect weird hitches in stuff like that, I definitely noticed that in Baldur’s Gate 3 with lighting effects) there’s a sumptuousness and wetness and warmth in all the right places to the environments that really feel like you’re walking along a path at sunset in an old growth forest. The feature sets involving AI in the newest cards are really the key, I think, and why my last gen premium card is lagging behind. DLSS 2.0 on the 4080 and 4090 especially are just revolutionary in how they work. The last gen cards just can’t quite keep up. It’s like magic, making frames out of seemingly thin air. In my opinion this is a good problem to have! I’d rather have games pushing the state of the art than sticking to what the PS5 and Xbox whatever it’s called these days can do.

supertrope 3y ago

Video games are slapped together because deadlines must be hit. The most popular titles can cost >$100 million to produce so there is huge pressure to get it out the door. Customers expect cutting edge graphics which contributes to production budget bloat (so does marketing). A lot of PC games are console first and ported over. The new console generation (PS5) means more VRAM is available so games expand to fill it. Just like how Blu-ray was a large increase over DVD capacity. Later 50GB was a ceiling commonly bumped up against. Once 50GB was exceeded why not have a 100GB install size since you’ve blown past the Blu-ray limit anyway?

zirgs 3y ago
This is not true about AW2 though - it's pretty clear that it's a PC-first title. Consoles run the game at medium-low settings. Max settings are for future PCs. Even the 4090 can't run it @ native 4k 60 fps with everything maxed out.

ThatPlayer 3y ago

The comment mentions they're running at max settings. So even current-gen high-end hardware might not be the target. As long as the lower settings scale down fine to lower end hardware, who cares about max settings? That's what the original article is about. Max settings also means enabled path tracing, which current-gen Nvidia's 4000 series have better hardware acceleration for. So you can't really compare performance to previous hardware which don't have that hardware acceleration. No amount of optimization is going to fix that, and it should probably be turned off if you're not on a 4000 series or newer card. In that same way, AMD's path tracing hardware acceleration falls behind Nvidia's. A current-gen high-end AMD RX 7900 XTX does worse than Nvidia's last-gen not as high-end 3070 in Cyberpunk 2077's path tracing update. https://youtu.be/cSq2WoARtyM?t=503 https://youtu.be/cSq2WoARtyM?t=503

doikor 3y ago

It is actually quite well optimised. It is one of the best looking video games ever made. Maxing everything means enabling path tracing which is a massive performance hit. Basically to do that you need a 4090 or a cheaper 40xx card and use frame generation. The “PS5/Series X equivalent” settings are a mixture of low/medium without any hardware ray tracing (I think it still does some software ray tracing similar to UE5 Lumen) using FSR2 with post processing effects done before the upscaling (low resolution). On PC if you use high post processing effects they happen after the upscaling and thus at much higher resolution (this is the “heaviest” option outside of the ray tracing stuff) Remedy hasn’t made a game that targets “native” resolution since Max Payne 2. Basically starting with the first Alan Wake game they have used lower internal resolutions and used the budget for other graphical effects. (On PC you still always had the option to use native resolution)