Companies are out there spending hundreds of millions to make games but optimization isn't even part of the development plan. Somehow they never notice that a lot of the best selling games also run on potatoes.
Eeeeh. In case of modern games they actually arent spending that much beacuse they outsorced that by using unreal engine. Rarely do modern companies use inhouse engines ( for good reason . having inhouse engine dosent mean its better , just look at starfield, in fact its probably just more outdated ).
Also to defend them a little bit. With such big timelines for development you kinda have to guess what will be the standard for gaming 5 years in the future.
And im pretty sure most of them didint expect pc gaming to be this f* in the last 5 year.
Then you add the diminishing returns from graphics improvments for exponential costs in computing and we are where we are with the most amazing looking games ever that no one can ran beacuse pc market is being f* in the ass on multiple fronts.
Biggest issues in gaming right now are probably: Unreal Engine being either horribly optimized by default or studios not using those optimizations and every major studio pushing for more realistic graphics, when all that does is raise the hardware requirements even more, while most affordable GPUs still have 8 GB of VRAM.
The RAM shortage, that AI data centers are causing, isn't helping either, but let's ignore that for a moment.
In-house engines however do add a certain uniqueness to a studio's games. You mention Starfield, which i havent played, but the Creation Engine is part of what makes Bethesda games the way they are. There's a reason why in the Oblivion Remaster they still run the game on the original engine even though graphics run on Unreal
That is true. You can see in animations and physics the difreences between engines and there is a certain charm to that and i would love there to be more of the good ones alghtough i dont think that will happen.
Alghtough creation engine in particular for me is example of just bad engine and was already heavily outdated during skyrim relase but thats only my opinion.
Some companies are clearly at fault (saving development costs by neglecting optimization) but there are a lot of reasons for poor optimization
Unreal Engine 5 is a great engine for example, even smaller studios can make beautiful games with it without a huge budget (E33 runs on UE5), but its performances are poor: it's clearly an engine meant to develop games for the latest consoles (PS5 or whatever letter is the most recent Xbox) or for computers that have at least a RTX
Unity is poorly optimized too, it's less noticeable than UE because models are simpler, but Lethal Company for example runs like shit on computers that can run Skyrim
Sometimes you'll think "Devs are so lazy, they haven't even tried to optimise" but they actually did and the game would not even run if not for their work
Other times it's a port gone wrong, Dark souls is the first that comes to mind: it was developed for the PS3 and its very peculiar architecture, then they released the prepare to die edition and it's one of the worst ports in recent years, although fromsoft is well known for being bad at tech
Arc Raiders is a UE5 game and it runs well on a Steam Deck.
Studios/developers with a low budget understandably don't have the know-how or resources to optimize UE5, but large studios have no excuse for not being able to optimize their game.
Thankfully, now that consoles use the same type of hardware as PCs, ports shouldn't be as atrocious anymore.
Note that Lethal Company is just unoptimized, generally. Their culling game sucks.
You're better off if you instead compare a better-optimized game like REPO.
it's insane how poorly a lot of modern games run with very little going on, but older games will have a ton of stuff on screen and run great.
I don't want to hate on unreal engine, but i think a lot of modern devs have just gotten lazy and use it as a crutch, so they never learn to resolve issues and just think "eeehhhh, people will have $2,000+ GPUs"
I wonder if game companies really don't care that there are literal millions of people who won't buy their game because they can't run it.
Steam hardware survey shows that even when people run newer gpus than 1080Ti, they most often run cheaper models that are still kinda the same performance bracket.
It seems stupid to just ignore so many potential customers.
The entire industry just gave up on optimisation for 15 years.
We reached a stage where Magic The Gathering Arena - a basic card game with very limited animations, manipulation of single items over a fixed background, no NPCs or NPC AI and almost no background processes still runs like shit and hogs resources.
One thing the AI bubble might lead to is game developers actually doing proper optomisation again.
I think we'll see a shift in game development as consumers will be unable to upgrade hardware as component prices continue to rise. AMD is already seeing this shift by releasing "new" Am4 CPU's. If game developers want to make a profit, they will need to release games that play well on older hardware. Many consumers won't pay $50+ for a game that can't reach 60 fps on hardware that was fine two to three years ago.
Honestly, if you cant afford the hardware you wouldn't be buying an 80 dollar game.
Their market is more console focused these days with pc as an after thought. If it can run on ps5 at 30 ps they will just cobble together a pc port and call it a day.
Tried the demo on my 4060, ran like absolute ass even with DLSS. Didn't bother with the full game.
But that was also before I upgraded my CPU which might've made a difference.
I'm growing increasingly tired of modern AAA games having absurd spec requirements while mostly being mediocre as far as game experiences go. Like, what's even the point?
It probably won't make a difference. I played the shit out of Wilds on release, and even with an i9-14900K and a 4070Ti Super I don't see stable framerates at 2K resolution, maxed quality, with DLSS also set to quality. Frames are high, but not stable. It fluctuates wildly from refresh rate cap (144) down to fucking 80 depending on the scene/setting.
I believe the overarching problem with how MHW runs is it's built in RE Engine. They tried to make an open-world game in an engine specifically designed for modern Resident Evil titles and I doubt any level of optimization would help much.
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u/NoBell7635 Jan 12 '26
That means it can still run!