So this problem started back in 2023 as in still occurring. Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor and Silent Hill 2 are some of the offenders. All these games were highly rated on gameplay and graphics
Basically, even if you have a 4090, the stutters and poor fps still exist due to the way the game is designed.
Its exceptionally frustrating because open world devs do optimise for performance while corridor type REMAKES like Dead Space and Silent Hill forget the work their predecessors did on worse hardware years ago
This is much older than 2023. I remember Fallout 4, the console version was apparently almost unplayable at launch, so Giant Bomb actually lowered the score, compared to the PC version. And even that example isn’t when this started.
Similarly, what if the reviewers don’t get a specific version, that runs like shit? Like what happened with Cyberpunk, where nobody was able to play the XBONE or PS4 versions.
The thing is, as always, a review is subjective. If the game has problems, but the reviewer can look past them or doesn’t care, why should they change the score.
Someone mentioned it already, but review copies might also run outdated code, and reviewers are in contact with the publisher or devs, and they might say some problem is fixed on release. If the reviewer believes them, it probably won’t affect the score.
I see this opinion fairly often, and it honestly confused me. My rig is not a showcase by any means, and I had no issues with sh2 or dead space.
I’m thinking more people need to optimize their OS.
In my experience it’s largely been unreal engine 5 games.
The issues with both Doom DA and Indiana Jones is that they have mandatory ray tracing that can’t be disabled. I generally think that ray tracing is a often a waste, it’s far too resource demanding, other lighting techniques can offer very similar visuals for a fraction of the cost.
Sure it wastes your resources but the devs don’t need to do much so it speeds up their workflow. You are a sacrifice they are willing to make.
The audience being a sacrifice doesn’t always work out when they’re the ones expected to buy the game.
Arkham Knight was the first I noticed it really bad on, no RT present. Since then it seems most Unreal titles suffer from it in some kind of way.
I had to refund armored core 6 because the first boss fight stuttered so much. I have a 3080, so not the best but definitely no slouch. No matter what settings I tweaked, it’d always drop to slideshow performance for 1-2 seconds at a time. Acceptable in a cheaper title, maybe, but not on a full price game.
Start reviewing games based on this kind of performance, or start paying attention to someone who are already doing it.
I don’t know of any.
I’ve heard the reasoning before that reviewers typically only have access to a, well, pre-release version. A day-1-patch is pretty common now.
So, as reviewer, you have to decide whether the performance problems look like they might be fixed on release day, and therefore whether you want to incorporate them into your review/score or not.Not to say this necessarily isn’t the case, but are your drivers all up to date? I don’t know how often I’ve heard people complain about shitty performance or weird artifacts in a game only to hear that the player hasn’t updated their graphics card drivers in 8 months.
Digital Foundry has complained about the stuttering issues in all of those games. Jedi Survivor still gets brought up.
Often times, the investors or stakeholders at these large video game companies have their backgrounds in Hollywood, or Tech. They then choose leadership who will run the company along the lines of what works well in those industries. This results in optimization being pretty damn near the bottom of the priorities.
What has been most profitable in Hollywood? Not the final quality of the movie, but the marketability. How many people did you get to come see it, doesn’t matter if they loved it, so long as they heard about it, then choose to buy a ticket.
What has worked well in tech? Getting to market as fast as possible with the latest technical developments. Doesn’t matter if it’s a buggy mess and riddled with technical debt, so long as we capture as much market share as possible before anyone else can compete.
Combine these two approaches and what do you get? The fanciest graphics, huge maps, endless procedural fetch quests to make it look big, all so people will preorder it. Oh and it needs to be done in 2 years or else someone else will beat us to being the fortnight of “live service extraction farming sims”.
So lots of demands on what needs to be in it, and no time to do proper QA, let alone optimize it, that will just have to be done in patches after launch.
The cost of poor optimization gets externalized to the customers who need to buy new hardware or run it on settings so low it could be mistaken for half-life.
I don’t even see the optimising problem as bad probably because I’m used to it. Evil Within for example ran terribly on launch but since then I have upgraded my setup and played through it. Checking the benchmarks just is something you should do on PC. Reviewers usually are pretty out of touch with rest of the world or average gamer just doesn’t care about drops and sub 30 framerates.
I feel like a worse problem currently is how games are made with TAA in mind or with forced TAA so you just can’t make them look good even with time and more powerful hardware. It’s either blurry mess with artifacts thrown in or something that doesn’t even look like 1080p on 4K resolution.
i was half-expecting a rant about PoE2 for some reason…
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Buddy it’s been going on since long before 2023.
