Are games getting lazy with graphics optimization?

[Nocturnia]

I'm not knowledgeable about tech, but I certain use my tech to play a lot of games. And...

Is it just me, or are games running worse these days, even stuff that doesn't seem GPU-intensive (i.e. stylized stuff, not just hyperrealism)?

My computer is dated now, and has serious throttling issues. Even so, there are a few "heavy" games that I can run without performance issues, even if my computer overheats doing it. These are games with graphics comparable to or even better than more recent games I've been playing that I have regular frame rate and stuttering issues with. Final Fantasy XIV? No problem. Horizon: Zero Dawn? No problem. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order? No problem. V Rising? No problem (as of the 1.0 release, at least). However, I find myself getting anywhere between 20~40 frames/sec in games such as Grounded, Raft, and Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. Both of these groups are generally all games with either open worlds or large, sprawling levels. And yet some of them give me frame rate issues while others don't. Games like Raft, especially, really don't seem that graphically intensive. But even if I turn down the settings, I still tend to get frame rate problems. I'm finding this to be especially true with Grounded, which has persistently been dropping my frame rate into the 20 range despite turning almost everything all the way down, and even reducing the rendering scale down to the point where it looks like I'm playing in 720p.

So what's with the new(ish) games these days? I feel like they're being built with only the latest hardware in mind or something, to the point that they're skipping out on optimization for lower spec PCs. That seems ridiculous to me, since the vast majority of gamers are not updating their rigs every 2-4 years. They're just ordinary folks playing on whatever computer they happen to have at the time.

 

[Pifanjr]

My guess would be that your CPU is your bottleneck in these games, not your GPU.

Dwarf Fortress has no graphics to speak of, especially not with the original ASCII graphics, but almost any computer will struggle running it once it has to do pathfinding for several hundred creatures multiple times per second.

Which isn't to say that these games aren't poorly optimised. Optimising code is a time consuming process and might not be worth doing for smaller developers as long as their game runs well enough on most computers.

 

[mjs warlord]

I am surprised you mention no problem with horizon zero dawn because loads of players have complained about the optimisation process that runs every time you launch the game. You can tell it is happening because the river that is at the bottom right of the menu page stutters instead of running smooth , the cpu goes to 100% and the fans go crazy until the optimiser has stopped running.

What really annoys me is when you get a new game and whilst you are customising the keys your fans suddenly go into overdrive for no apparent reason. The first time this happened to me was when i got railway empire in 2018 , all i was doing was looking at the menus and task manager showed me that my pc was about to go into outer space. The devs said they thought it was a memory leak and at the point where i decided to stop using it the problem had not been fixed.

 

[DXCHASE]

I would say your problem is probably due to the pc your using being dated, some games are gonna run great and some are gonna run bad, newer games rely too much on new tech and beefer, newer systems to run, which is annoying, but if you take a look at a lot of the pc requirements for newer games, even basic requirements rely on a somewhat modern system gpu/cpu combo.

But i dont disagree with the statement. Too many games come out these days that are horribly optimized or some patch they upload breaks so much other stuff, graphics wise. CDPR released Cyberpunk 2077 in a literally unplayable state because of how terribly unoptimized it was. Along with what @Pifanjr said, Far Cry 6 was cpu reliant to the point where you can have a high end gpu but have abysmal FPS if your cpu was older.

 

[Zloth]

It's all really messy. Take trees, for instance. You can make a pretty good tree by making six flat planes and painting trees on each one. They look fine as long as you don't look too close. You can also just make a tree out of polygons like you would anything else, of course. They look far better when you look closely, but that means more polygons to draw and texture.

Assuming a game that isn't about looking at trees, what is that six plane method? If your framerate is having a difficult time, that's clever graphics optimization. If not, it's lazy developers taking shortcuts.

But, if you are changing the graphics settings a lot and your framerate isn't changing much, that probably means CPU issues. Grounded is multiplayer, so it could be the game is waiting on the network, too, depending on how the game deals with slow networks.

 

[Nocturnia]

I was playing Grounded in offline mode, single player. However, I agree that it is probably a CPU/bottleneck issue. I'm not sure why, exactly, since I think my CPU is supposed to be on par with my GPU. I was even less knowledgeable when I bought this PC, though. Also, it's a laptop. And if I had to name its biggest problem, it would be lack of cooling leading to overheating. But it also overheats because it always seems to be working so hard whenever I play literally any game. Presumably that's the CPU going into overdrive to try to keep up. Without my cooling pad on and without AC counteracting the computer's heat generation, the frame rate issues become much worse.

I generally don't play many AAA games. So I was just wondering why games that seem so much less intensive, like Raft, are causing me trouble. Re: Horizon Zero Dawn, to be honest, I can't remember. I don't recall having much trouble with it, but it probably did have at least a bit of a lowered frame rate. And I started Grounded last night and was having a lot of frame rate frustrations.

Unfortunately, I'm not very clear on which piece of hardware handles what. My understanding is that CPU handles stuff like the existence and movement of objects and NPCs, while the GPU handles rendering. So I have always been confused as to why I don't see many issues with masses of NPCs. For example, Risk of Rain 2 doesn't start giving my computer problems until, like, Stage 20+. Unless the air smells like sweet strawberries...

 

[Zloth]

My understanding is that CPU handles stuff like the existence and movement of objects and NPCs, while the GPU handles rendering.

GPU does basically all the rendering on screen, yeah. (Assuming your GPU is doing it - laptops can occasionally switch up on you and use the much weaker GPU in the CPU to draw the screen.)

It's the CPU side where everything gets extra murky. The CPU should be doing all the AI, dealing with all the input... really, everything that isn't rendering. Where the murky comes in is the CPU's cores. You've essentially got 4+ CPUs in your PC. The question is, can the game use all of them? The answer, unfortunately, is "probably not."

Say I write up a tiny little program that just takes the cosine of random numbers endlessly and run it. Back in the 90s before multi-core CPUs, running that would slam the CPU up to 100% usage, so much so that it may be a little difficult to get the program to stop. These days, though, it just cranks the CPU up to 25% or less because it's all running on one 'thread,' so only one of the cores deals with it while the rest just idle. If I leave the program running and then run it again, so I've got two instances, another core gets used to run that one. A single program can "multi-thread" so it uses multiple cores, but it takes some special conditions and can result in very hard-to-fix bugs that only happen when the timing is just right.

If a game program can use more than one core, it can run a lot faster. If it can't, then not so much.

What really gets confusing to me is when the GPUs many (MANY MANY) little cpu-like shaders can get used. That goes past "multi-thread" and into "massively parallel" territory. There are some "help the scientists calculate several jillion things" programs that can tap into those.

 

[Nocturnia]

So, I guess when I eventually get a new computer, I should get fewer cores, but more powerful ones? I suppose for my purposes, CPU is probably much more important than GPU, since I really don't play that many GPU-heavy games. Although it's always a little hard to tell. I generally don't play a lot of AAA games, though. I mostly play a mix of hit indie titles and older MMOs, with a few old, on-sale AAA games thrown in. Plus a few random things most people probably haven't heard of.

 

[Zloth]

So, I guess when I eventually get a new computer, I should get fewer cores, but more powerful ones?

Theoretically, yes - but there's a thing: we can't make them faster. Well, we can make them somewhat faster by paying a lot more, but I think the speed per dollar (correcting for inflation) has only gone up 10%-20% in the past five years. I haven't bought in a while, so I haven't paid a lot of attention. Basically: don't waste your money buying more than, say, six cores for gaming.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

6 cores is perfect for gaming for the forseeable future. Its not really possible to buy fewer more powerful cores unless youre talking about standard Intel or Ryzen vs some 64 core enterprise chip which you wouldnt want without a specific reason anyway.

Some games are scaling across 8 cores I think now, but its mostly a wash or so close you wouldnt notice. It also depends on other things, higher monitor resolution puts more load on the graphics card which hides a CPU limit, also a more powerful GPU will hit the limits of a CPU more than a slower one.

Decent article from Techspot here that demonstrates the difference across a range of newer games and a mid range GPU vs a higher end one.

6 Cores vs. 8 Cores for Gaming: 24 Game Benchmark

If you're looking to upgrade from an older Ryzen or building a new PC, the two most attractive options for gamers right now are arguably the Ryzen...

www.techspot.com

 

[Rolfil]

6 cores is perfect for gaming for the forseeable future

Depends on what 6 cores they are
My Ryzen 1600X needs to be replaced soon - probably with a 9800X3D when it's released. I might wait till RDNA4 is released in Q1 2025 as I need to replace the rest my system anyway.

I'm still impressed with my 1600X but there are games where it's just not up to scratch now. Upgrading my GPU from a 1060 6GB to a 6700XT just over a year ago helped though.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Depends on what 6 cores they are
My Ryzen 1600X needs to be replaced soon - probably with a 9800X3D when it's released. I might wait till RDNA4 is released in Q1 2025 as I need to replace the rest my system anyway.

I'm still impressed with my 1600X but there are games where it's just not up to scratch now. Upgrading my GPU from a 1060 6GB to a 6700XT just over a year ago helped though.

Thats true, I should have stated I was meaning about latest generations from the last few years.

 

[mjs warlord]

Just decided to add another contribution to this post.
I think i might have mentioned this before but not sure if i did it here or on digital spy forum.

I think programmers are getting lazy with all sorts of things for example look at how many different terms are put on a games development.

1. pre alpha 2. alpha 3. beta 4 experimental 5. early access 6 finished ..... fingers crossed.

If the devs want our feedback to help them they should sell it at a reduced price until they decide it fit for purpose.

Take for example the construction game SATISFACTORY it came out in 2017 , i have used it for 4 years and they just announced version 1.0 update which presumably means finished will be released on september 10th.

The worse example i have ever seen was a few months ago , the game was so bad that i cant even remember what it was called , after 1 hour i posted a long list on steam of things that did not work. A week later the indie guy said his game wont have anything else done to it as he was moving onto his next project.