Why are so many games so unoptimized?

[Mr. Freeze]

I spent a few hundred on a Radeon R9 390 a year and a half ago as a "not quite the best but still amazing" GPU that would take me through a few years of 1080p gaming at 60FPS on Ultra. So far, the results have been all over the damn place. I have no doubt I own a great card, but the graphical output and framerate varies so wildly from game to game I'm tempted to blame the Dev's optimization. 

 

Doom 2016 runs at 90+ FPS consistently. But Wolfenstein: The New Order struggles to hit 60FPS on High (this is easily the worst game as far as unoptimization goes). 

Killing Floor 2 throws a shitfit on Ultra settings, but Overwatch handles Epic settings like a champion at 100+FPS. 

Resident Evil 7 is on Maximum settings at 100+FPS. Serious Sam 3 chugs like a bastard between 45 and 60 depending on the map. So does Hitman 2016, except down to 20FPS sometimes. 

 

Anyone else observe this problem? I'm not due to upgrade for a few years so I'm really hoping a few AAA games down the road don't blow my system out. 

 

 

[CARRiON]

Yep. Welcome to the club.

 

Wolfenstein, and all Tech 5 games in general are a total gamble depending on your system. It's a terrible fucking engine, it's ugly as hell, and I'm glad id Tech 6 is here to replace it for good. Wolfenstein runs like dog shit for me too. So does The Evil Within which uses the same engine.

 

Otherwise, it really is up to the dev, and whether or not they are AMD/nVidia bias, or just incompetent. DOOM runs great thanks to Vulkan.

[MrGlide]

Wolfenstein the new orders fps is capped at 60, and If I remember correctly there are quite a few bugs if you uncap it.

[AdirBlaz]

I've always thought that certain engines or even the company that developed the game seems to be the mark of when a game is gonna run horribly. I have issues with games that are made with something like Unity for some reason, but if I play a different game that looks about the same graphics-wise, but has a totally different engine, I suddenly get max framerate. 

 

i.e.; I play The Forest, runs on Unity and has some pretty good graphics quality, but not insanely-HD. Yet i get about 23 or less framerate on lowest settings. Then I go play something like Far Cry 3, running on some other engine, but the graphic quality can be considered even better than Forest's. Suddenly in Farcry, I'm getting the most framerate, like 60+.

[geo]

The #1 game I've heard performance complaints about has been ARK: Survival Evolved. I have several friends who can't run it. Its almost the modern day RAGE. One friend said he bought a new $2,000 PC for it and still couldn't play it. They solved one of the issues. Something about the skybox or the sun. Something like that.

 

As for other optimization and performance issues it could be a variety of reasons on both a hardware and or software. How many CPU cores does the PC have, how much RAM, how much filesize. As for hardware, Unreal 4 engine games NEED quad core. I've tried to play them with a dual core and its noticeably slow.  Is there popin? How's your hard drive speed? Unreal 3 was notorious for having slow texture popin.

 

Is it rendering multiple surfaces? Is there dynamic lighting? Is it trying to do something each and every frame rather than every X number of frames? What about particle effects and emitters? Are those firing off dozens a second? Is the game world busy loading when it shouldn't be? How are the files organized? Is something trying to read a .png rather than a .txt file? Is it rendering things you're not looking at? Are there memory leaks that begin to build up? Like something that doesn't get fixed until the map is done and you return to the lobby? Is it trying to OVER calculate pathfinding? Is it lost in a for / while / repeat loop for an extended period of time? Is it trying to calculate far too much collision within a frame?

 

There was one developer making lesser games that had a ridiculous beast of a PC. Something I didn't even believe existed. Well people kept finding pin hole memory leaks that would grind his games to a halt. He never noticed the slowdown since his PC was just that much of a beast. It seemed ridiculous his 100 MB games would need like 3.4 gHz quad cores and 8 GB RAM.

 

Then there's latency for online games. How's your ping? Low or high? How is the server running it? Does it have enough power to be running 20 - 200 games at once even in text only mode?

 

Here's one I recently found.... my laptop was set to a minimum processor percentage of 5% and a maximum of 100% Skyrim would go at 60 fps on ultra. While lesser games seemed to be frame rate locked at 45 when they were designed for 60. Well upping the processor minimum from 5% to 10% I no longer have any problems. I hear that could be a multithreadding issue. No clue what that is other than maybe a game only uses 1 core rather than all cores it can.

Wasn't there a version of windows or at least a setting that would give you a popup saying something is using a lot of processor speed if a game wasn't frame rate locked? I seem to remember getting that a few times.

 

All 3 games ran smooth for me on ultra. Doom 4, Wolfenstien and Killing Floor 2. I don't have the balls to test them on my current laptop... but Skyrim runs fine!

 

Chances are someone more professional than I can go deeper into the knowledge base than I can.

 

Edited July 9, 2017 by geo

[HorrorMovieRei]

5 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Killing Floor 2 throws a shitfit on Ultra settings

What is it about Unreal Engine games that they just run horribly? And this is only made worse by the fact that it's such a commonly used engine. Take ROTT's reboot for example. It's a 2013 game, and yet I still experience FPS drop in some maps despite having a 2015 build, and running the game on medium. Is the engine itself just poorly optimized, or is it just a coincidence that everyone who makes games for it don't bother optimizing?

[Cupboard]

Man, Amnesia: The Dark Descent ( a game with very few enemies on-screen at any one time) ran just horribly on my laptop even on lowest settings (my laptop is over 6 years old). But I can run Doom 3 and Civilization 5 on the lowest settings just fine.

 

I thinks sometimes the independent game studios don't have a large enough budget to spend time fixing bugs and brainstorming a lot of optimizations. It's just not what they can focus on, given their smaller teams and tight development schedules 

[Mr. Freeze]

1 hour ago, HorrorMovieGuy said:

What is it about Unreal Engine games that they just run horribly? And this is only made worse by the fact that it's such a commonly used engine. Take ROTT's reboot for example. It's a 2013 game, and yet I still experience FPS drop in some maps despite having a 2015 build, and running the game on medium. Is the engine itself just poorly optimized, or is it just a coincidence that everyone who makes games for it don't bother optimizing?

UE in general is supposed to downscale very well (one of the reasons it's so popular on consoles), the problem is that to downscale it well the dev in question has to know their shit. 

 

I actually forgot about ROTT! When I first got my rig that was the second game I installed...what an unoptimized, chaotic disappointment that was. 

 

[Agentbromsnor]

To answer the question directly: many modern games are un-optimized because optimizing complex code such as that of a game engine takes a lot of time and effort, and big companies simply don't want to risk that anymore (at least, whenever they can). Instead, it's way easier to just throw together a game in Unity and call it a day. That's not to say that a game made in Unity can't be fun, but there's something to be said about a lot of these modern games that are build with tools that utilize a ton of abstraction.

[Agentbromsnor]

1 hour ago, Cupboard said:

Man, Amnesia: The Dark Descent ( a game with very few enemies on-screen at any one time) ran just horribly on my laptop even on lowest settings (my laptop is over 6 years old). But I can run Doom 3 and Civilization 5 on the lowest settings just fine.

 

I thinks sometimes the independent game studios don't have a large enough budget to spend time fixing bugs and brainstorming a lot of optimizations. It's just not what they can focus on, given their smaller teams and tight development schedules 

Really? I remembering playing Amnesia on my old Core 2 Duo PC with an ATI Radeon 7700. It ran pretty well, with a consistent and acceptable frame-rate.
For a lot of modern games, it's nearly always the GPU that makes or breaks a game.

[Flesh420]

The main reason is because hardware isn't like it was.  Developers don't have to optimize code to squeeze in the things they want, or get creative with code anymore, and with modern cpus they can be lazy and get away with it because people with decent pcs (not all the time) won't notice glaring unoptimization.  Console ports are one of the best examples of such laziness.

[axdoomer]

They don't bother optimizing their games, because why? It costs money for them and *you* can just buy a new graphics card.

 

Instead of optimizing their games, developers give you an option to lower the quality of the graphics. On older games (like DOS games and early Windows), developers thought it was important to run the game on as many computers as possible to reach a broader audience. Now it's like they don't care, because you'll buy the game anyways.

[DooM_RO]

I guess it is because games are getting more and more complicated from a technical POV. Lots of interconnected, moving parts.

[Nine Inch Heels]

Been down that road quite a few times by now, and to be perfectly honest it makes me actually hesitant to invest into a high-end machine. Granted, the question of something new every two years, or every 4 years for example might end up being relatively unimportant from a financial point of view, but at least I don't experience the frustration of having a really good machine on which games perform unreasonably poorly.

 

Path of exile, a game I played quite a bit in the past, runs better on my laptop than it does on my PC, and both fulfill that game's minimum requirements several times over, if that makes any sense. I was expecting that game to perform better on my actual PC, but my laptop wins that race by a long shot when it comes to consistent framerates. Fun story in regards to that game: One its most popular yet relatively casually playing streamers called ZiggyD got an AMD sponsorship, and they hooked him up with quite a powerful machine. Guess what? His older PC still worked better, while the high-end machine had framerate issues.

 

You get that shit just about everywhere when it comes to AAA titles, especially when they're being developed for both console and PC.

[dpJudas]

4 hours ago, axdoomer said:

They don't bother optimizing their games, because why? It costs money for them and *you* can just buy a new graphics card.

 

Instead of optimizing their games, developers give you an option to lower the quality of the graphics. On older games (like DOS games and early Windows), developers thought it was important to run the game on as many computers as possible to reach a broader audience. Now it's like they don't care, because you'll buy the game anyways.

Uh, no they didn't. I remember clearly that Quake was virtually unplayable on my 486-DX2. Doom required a 486 - yeah, sure, you could theoretically run it on less but it wouldn't meet the "60 fps" criteria (yes, yes, 35 hz). They were "playable" in the same way that the original poster is describing modern games.

 

If anything, modern games tend to work on a lot older hardware than they used to.

[geo]

RAGE was unplayable for a lot of people up until a few years ago.

[Cupboard]

I still consider RAGE just about unplayable from an artistic perspective

[Deleted_Account]

Even NUTS.wad has a hard time running.