Games are less and less optimized.

Kiyoris

Hello.

I notice that many MMO aren't actually graphically impressive, in respect to our system specs.

People now have 16GB of RAM for example.

Everquests system requirement for Depths were 256MB....megabyte...not gigabyte.

The RAM people had then was 64 TIMES lower than what we have now.

Yet EQ looked pretty decent back then, and I don't think the jump in graphics is anywhere near 64 times as high.

Lobotomist

I have to agree. The race for "visuals" have made producers to completely disregard optimization.

I work as technical artist in computer game company, and my job is to devise ways to implement graphic.

But every time i say : If you add this , it will seriously impact game performance - Nobody cares

Its so that the game looks good , how it runs nobody cares.

And than when comes launch date, and they figure that no PC can run that shit - than they have to remove half of graphic they made ...

Want examples ?

Witcher 3 ( the game looks 50% less good than in 3 year old presentation ), Dark Souls ( removed darkness and shadows ) , Watch Dogs .... etc

Kazuhiro

Your correct, the reason modern games seem so poorly optimized is because they use modern game engines, which are designed to use modern specs. Then the developers use that engine to make a sub-par game.

That gives you poor graphical games with high system specs.

Dullahan

FFXIV puts most MMOs to shame on optimization. While I'm struggling to run many games above medium, I can run FFXIV in mostly high in DX11 mode and keep a consistent 60fps.

In general though, optimization is a big problem that should be getting better, but isn't.

bone15

[mod edit]

The Engine first of all must be optimized and the amount of codes must be reduced in order to make the game more smooth. and also effects and graphics of a game requires alot and there is most likely 1000x line of codes for each graphical item then it was back then.

your arguement is extreamly invalid.. it's obvious things requires more.

or would u say virtual reality that we get sometime will require the same? to transfer the mind of a human into a game?

[mod edit]

Nitth

bone15 said:

The Engine first of all must be optimized and the amount of codes must be reduced in order to make the game more smooth.

That is the most ridiculous shit ive ever heard.

Its not about how many lines you write that determines performance, it's HOW you write them.

mgilbrtsn

This has been a problem for a long time.  A few years ago (ok maybe more than a few years), memory and computer capabilities were very limited and programmers had to be efficient with their code.  With the advent of cheaper and cheaper memory and computers in general, they could afford to be less efficient.  

DeniZg

If you asked the same question a year ago, I would agree that the games are not optimized well.
But, many games lately have been optmized really well.
GTA V is very well optimized across all platforms. Witcher 3 is optimized well for PC, but runs bad on consoles. ESO is optimized pretty well for all platforms. Battlefield and Battlefront are very well optimized on all platforms as well.
What people usually fail to realize is that all MMORPGs are very CPU heavy and when they buy new PC with 50$ CPU and 16 gigs of RAM, the crying on forums begins.

makasouleater69

It is because, MMOers say things like, graphics don't matter, its game play, you cant have good graphics cause its a mmo. So when you say things like that, and respond with your wallet. The devs go o well, they will buy it either way. Not to mention, barely any one has a computer capable of playing high end games. Just go to the 26000 posts on the ARK steam forum, 90 percent of them are people complaining their 40 year old laptop can't play ARK right. DeniZg said:

If you asked the same question a year ago, I would agree that the games are not optimized well.
But, many games lately have been optmized really well.
GTA V is very well optimized across all platforms. Witcher 3 is optimized well for PC, but runs bad on consoles. ESO is optimized pretty well for all platforms. Battlefield and Battlefront are very well optimized on all platforms as well.
What people usually fail to realize is that all MMORPGs are very CPU heavy and when they buy new PC with 50$ CPU and 16 gigs of RAM, the crying on forums begins.

As far as that goes, that is about as untrue, as most of the other posts here. There is one MMO that is CPU heavy, and its called Everquest 2. All the other ones require graphics cards. Take ESO, if your theory were true, which its not, but if it was. Some one with a i7 6 oced to 4.5 ghz, and a gtx 560, vs some one with a amd 1090t underclocked to 3ghz and a 980 ti gtx, your saying the guy with the processor that is 4x+ faster should get better fps. Well you would find out quick enough that the guy with the i7 would get barely 20fps, at medium settings. The guy with the 980, would be rocking well over 60fps on 1080 max settings. 

There are almost no games, that you see a huge increase with, by increasing your cpu over your graphics card, besides everquest 2, but even there you cant tell, because the only way to get a playable frame rate there is have a 10 ghz cpu. 

I mean just take your cpu, and under clock it by 1000 mhz, and i guarantee you your fps isnt gonna go down all that much, under clock your gpu by 1000 mhz, and you gonna lose 20 30 fps. 

So yeah, buying a 100 dollar amd 8350, and a 970 gtx, vs buying a i7 6 gen and a cheap 750 gpu, is gonna make the crying start, because the person who spend 400 bucks on a cpu, and 80 on gpu, vs the guy who spend 100 on a cpu and 400 on a gpu will be getting 10x the fps.  Esp when we got people, telling others, the cpu matters a lot. 

Quizzical

I think you overestimate what hardware could do to constitute 64x "better" graphics.

If you double the texture resolution in each dimension, that takes four times the memory right there.  Want to double your draw distances?  That means at least four times as much stuff has to be loaded, and possibly as high as eight, depending on how much it scales with the vertical dimension.

For computational performance, you can easily have 2/3 of the computations be just to do a few fancy lighting effects.  If that's what's killing your performance, turn off those few effects and you're fine.  Often if a game seems to be running poorly, it's just a matter of finding the few settings to turn off and then it runs smoothly--and those few settings don't necessarily even make the game look better.

ArChWind

Quizzical said:

I think you overestimate what hardware could do to constitute 64x "better" graphics.

If you double the texture resolution in each dimension, that takes four times the memory right there.  Want to double your draw distances?  That means at least four times as much stuff has to be loaded, and possibly as high as eight, depending on how much it scales with the vertical dimension.

For computational performance, you can easily have 2/3 of the computations be just to do a few fancy lighting effects.  If that's what's killing your performance, turn off those few effects and you're fine.  Often if a game seems to be running poorly, it's just a matter of finding the few settings to turn off and then it runs smoothly--and those few settings don't necessarily even make the game look better.

Best answer ever.

Arkade99

Optimization is usually one of the last things developers do. There's no point in optimizing code that may get changed in a month. Unfortunately for most games, good optimization starts with good design. If they get close to launch and realize that a different design would have been more optimal, it's too late to change it, so they just have to optimize it as best they can.

Also, employee turnover, lack of focus/direction and frequent requirement changes can have a serious impact on the quality of the code. A coder may choose the optimal design for a specific set of requirements, then find out that the requirements have changed and the design is no longer optimal. Re-designing it may not be an option, so they have to make the new changes work with the current design.

So yes, computers and graphics cards and memory have all gotten bigger and better, but the same problems that existed 15 years ago still exist today.

makasouleater69

I just wanted to add, I am not sure why you are focused on ram op anyways. Ram and Video ram of course are important, but they have such a limited factor in it. Such as the radeon 390x has 8gbs, but the 970 gtx with 4gbs, slower memory, gets better FPS. Ram to my knowledge only has to do with texture sizes, which after a point, is just a waste of ram. Such as going from skyrim pine trees 4k to 8k, it uses alot more ram, but really you can't tell the difference, unless you go up to the tree, and stare at it for like 15 mins, and then compare it to a picture of 4k. 

Loktofeit

Quizzical said:

I think you overestimate what hardware could do to constitute 64x "better" graphics.

If you double the texture resolution in each dimension, that takes four times the memory right there.  Want to double your draw distances?  That means at least four times as much stuff has to be loaded, and possibly as high as eight, depending on how much it scales with the vertical dimension.

For computational performance, you can easily have 2/3 of the computations be just to do a few fancy lighting effects.  If that's what's killing your performance, turn off those few effects and you're fine.  Often if a game seems to be running poorly, it's just a matter of finding the few settings to turn off and then it runs smoothly--and those few settings don't necessarily even make the game look better.

Shadows, fog, and clouds are currently some of the biggest offenders when it comes to performance cost vs gameplay contribution. 

Flyte27

I agree on the diminishing returns factor.

I find that games are far less buggy and laggy on PC today then they ever were.  They are also often times not as much fun in many cases IMO.  Sometimes I can go back and play a 2D pixel game and enjoy it more then a modern game with an amazing looking 3D world.  Said old game may also be filled with bugs like Everquest was.  One might argue the bugs were what created some of the funny moments in game.

I think if you want optimized games it's better to get a console or and apple device.  Your are far more likely to get something optimized when the hardware is the same for everyone.  That doesn't mean you will get better performance though.  The faster hardware will still win in the end with regards to that.

I find a fair amount of PC games these days are actually console games.  I have a PS4 myself and most new games I get on PC have the same controls as there is almost always controller support.  I also see some games that would generally only be on PC like Divinity Original Sin coming out on Consoles with innovative control schemes.

I have a GTX 980 TI and if I play the WItcher 3 on Ultra it looks great, but it also pumps out a lot of hot air into my room.  It's like a mini heater.  My Case is huge and has good air flow.  This is why the room fills up with hot air quickly.  Playing the game on lower settings with reduce the heat output a bit.  On the flip side the PS4 seems to get a bit hot, but it appears to dissipate most of the heat.  The room doesn't appear to get hot when playing games like the Witcher 3.  I feel that there is a limit on how far the hardware can go and to much time ends up getting spend on things like graphics and physics instead of making a fun game to play.

I guess my point is that if the game is fun to play that is what really matters.  I find the fun isn't generally from great graphics or smooth gameplay always.  A lot of the time it is something more intangible and personal.

KenFisher

SWTOR was the first, for me, that felt like it suffered from lack of optimization.

GW1 is easily the best I've seen.  Looks sweet, runs on a toaster (slang for PC that makes more heat than processing power).

Deathofsage

A couple of things that need to be considered, though I'm not excusing the performance.. I do agree that XP era developers would have lost their minds with the possibilities that 16 gb ram should be capable of.

Most players can and do run multiple things while gaming. People almost expect to be able to alt-tab and listen to youtube or watch a quick tutorial.

It's not all graphics models. It's shadows, it's smoother movement, it's particle effects, it's being able to watch a cutscene and render in the background (loading screens). It's more players on the screen, it's better physics. It's nicer looking abilities and proper overlap/transition between animations. For some games, it's the ability of trajectory to determine the target rather than target determining the trajectory.

Righteous_Rock

I have found that even though I am somewhat tech savvy, dealing with pc optimization is so annoying to me that I don't bother with pc games. I get my kicks from consoles now, the price /performance on the hardware and auto optimization are the key factors that have made me return to console.

MrSnuffles

The problem are not Game Engines or lazy developers. The problem are the GPU Manufacturers. All GPUs on the market are 32Bit, they don't understand 64Bit at all. The drivers are outdated to the point where they are not able to take advantage of modern multicore/thread CPUs.

When your Graphics Hardware is more than a decade behind the rest of the Hardware you don't need to wonder why there is no "optimization". I fact the basic architecture has not changed since 1998.

This will hopefully change with DX12 and a new Generation of GPUs that finally support 64Bit.

Quizzical

MrSnuffles said:

The problem are not Game Engines or lazy developers. The problem are the GPU Manufacturers. All GPUs on the market are 32Bit, they don't understand 64Bit at all. The drivers are outdated to the point where they are not able to take advantage of modern multicore/thread CPUs.

When your Graphics Hardware is more than a decade behind the rest of the Hardware you don't need to wonder why there is no "optimization". I fact the basic architecture has not changed since 1998.

This will hopefully change with DX12 and a new Generation of GPUs that finally support 64Bit.

This is complete nonsense.  For starters, any GPU with more than 4 GB of memory has 64-bit memory addressing or else it's impossible to use all of its memory.  You probably want 64-bit memory addressing before that, even, in order to allow the GPU to borrow system memory as needed.

Next, GPUs can do 64-bit computations; it's merely much slower than 32-bit computations.  For example, 64-bit floating point computations are supported in OpenGL 4.0 or later; 64-bit integer and floating point computations are supported in any version of OpenCL at all.  If games wanted to use 64-bit computations, they could; they generally don't because there's not much advantage to doing so.

Graphics is very heavily focused on 32-bit floating point computations.  In some places, even 16-bit floating point arithmetic would be plenty.  The extra precision of 64-bit computations would be mildly nice to avoid rounding errors in some places when doing geometry computations, mainly to allow one thing to cover another while being very close to it.  For color computations, 64-bit arithmetic has no advantage over 32-bit at all.

Furthermore, GPU architectures have changed radically since 1998.  1998 itself brought the first GPUs with multiple shaders on a single GPU; today's GPUs have thousands of them.  We got programmable shaders in 2001; before that, GPUs were fixed-function architectures, and programming them really just meant giving them different data.  Then we got unified shaders in 2006, which makes possible GPU compute other than for graphics; more immediately, it allowed geometry shaders in graphics.  Greatly increasing use of SIMD scheduling over the course of a number of years made massive increases in compute capabilities possible.  Then we got tessellation in 2009.  Since then, we've had all sorts of little architectural changes to make GPU programming far more versatile, such as increasing register file sizes or the proliferation of high-throughput GDDR5 memory and more recently HBM.

Wizardry

It is the developer,most if not ev1 of our rpg's are not optimized to use  the gpu,the code is still using a lot of your overall system and even when using the gpu it still has to use your cpu.The fastest memory on our cache is not nearly enough to handle what we need ,so the problem will exist for a very long time until ALL components of our PC are very fast.

Then we have the next phsse of the problem,we are not even seeing quality games,NOT ONE,every single one of these games is doing a little something here or there byut none of them are an overall complete package with depth in systems,graphics,animations,UI,AI,effects,textures etc etc.I can only imagine how long it will take before i see a really good triple A quality BUILT game and what kind of system i will need to run it.

It doesn't end there,you have to do some optimizing of every single section/zoned off part of a map,weather it is a physically seen zone line or not.There is no way these devs who are already going cheap on their design efforts are going to put a lot more work into optimization.

What i am actually seeing are devs are moving closer to automating everything,from game mechanics to map builds even the optimizing.We are NOT witnessing passionate game designs but merely business products,do as little as possible to sell the product and hope for LUCK.The whole gaming market got it easy when people started accepting VERY cheap game builds like browser games and Moba's,even HS a simple card game was done rather cheap by Blizzard whom we all know for FACT could have done a million times better job with it.

Vermillion_Raventhal

SWG was bad for me I can say and that was back in the day.  

waynejr2

mgilbrtsn said:

This has been a problem for a long time.  A few years ago (ok maybe more than a few years), memory and computer capabilities were very limited and programmers had to be efficient with their code.  With the advent of cheaper and cheaper memory and computers in general, they could afford to be less efficient.  

Back in the 70s/80s, a guy named Daniel Lawrence used to go to conventions and demo his game Telengard. It was one of the very first crpgs and it had 50 levels of dungeon (think of 50 floors) with millions of rooms.  It originally ran on a computer with only 8k ram.  There was no room for maps so he created procedurally generated maps.

I am sure some companies are interested in optimization but not certain all of them put top priority on it.  It should be something all companies look at to some degree.

Quizzical

Some code needs to be optimized a lot more than others.  My guess is that it's typical for a few hundred lines of pixel/fragment shader code to account for the outright majority of the work that the GPU does.  Any respectable company is going to optimize that little bit of code.

Meanwhile, a game can easily have tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code that run so rarely that even if you could make it all run ten times as fast, no one would ever notice outside of synthetic timings.  So "optimizing" that code is not about performance, but about debugging and documenting it.  In some cases, games will even use scripting languages for a bunch of code that are slower than a compiled language by an order of magnitude or so--but only for the portions of code that run rarely and so performance doesn't matter.

FrodoFragins

Kazuhiro said:

Your correct, the reason modern games seem so poorly optimized is because they use modern game engines, which are designed to use modern specs. Then the developers use that engine to make a sub-par game.

That gives you poor graphical games with high system specs.

They often use 3rd party engines not designed for MMO's and then get stuck trying to optimize someone else's code.

waynejr2

Quizzical said:

I think you overestimate what hardware could do to constitute 64x "better" graphics.

If you double the texture resolution in each dimension, that takes four times the memory right there.  Want to double your draw distances?  That means at least four times as much stuff has to be loaded, and possibly as high as eight, depending on how much it scales with the vertical dimension.

For computational performance, you can easily have 2/3 of the computations be just to do a few fancy lighting effects.  If that's what's killing your performance, turn off those few effects and you're fine.  Often if a game seems to be running poorly, it's just a matter of finding the few settings to turn off and then it runs smoothly--and those few settings don't necessarily even make the game look better.

They don't want to hear the math. They just want their magical thinking to work.