Outside of a few notable exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.
And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.
… Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.
Most permaonline ‘hardcore’ gamers, people you see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming ‘journalists’, and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers… they’re all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.
This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.
Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.
At this point, the disparity is so extreme that I would not be surprised if GTA 6 more or less ends up being the beginning of the end of Rockstar.
People are not going to be able to pay the prices they will need to charge for their basically ‘decade of investment’ game that primarily serves as an MTX platform.
The performance issues are a major one for me, nothing worse than firing up a new game and getting 40fps with tons of stuttering along the way.
I feel like most newer games also have trouble with low/medium settings not really being that much better for performance, so there’s no fix for it.
I remember older games where low was like staring at a character made from 12 polygons and everything looked awful, but it would run on just about anything.
Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.
They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don’t.
A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?
Yeah, they’re now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.
Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.
Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and on one level, I don’t blame them, it is absurdly complex.
Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics… while also being more performant, running on older hardware.
Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you’re not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.
EDIT: 12 polygons you say?
Runs on anything, you say?
… ok, hear me out:
What if there is more to a video game than just how graphically realistic it is… what if it could be immersive, convincing, memorable, complex, not totally railroad you through a blatently OP power fantasy, linear story, even make the player really think about some real world serious shit, while also having a bit of goofy levity from time to time?
Man if there was a game like that, you’d have to reinstall it or something, sheesh.
(This entire game fits on a single CD ROM, btw, less than 750 MB)
While I have no love for a lot of modern AAA devs, Threat Interactive is not an authority on whatever he preaches. No games shipped, only some UE5 snake oil config files. No proof of any experience or credibility, just bashing. I wouldn’t watch that stuff or bring it up as some sort of authority on 3D graphics.
Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn’t worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn’t any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.
Hah! And here I am at a company where everyone does premature optimisations, that end up killing performance because they make the actually needed performance optimisations impossible without major refactoring.
to your GTA 6 point: i will not be buying it until it releases on pc. rumor is, and history agrees, that it will be a console only release for like a year. and even then im gonna borrow it first to see if its worth a shit before paying a dime. and i might not pay even if i do like it lol
Outside of a few notable exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.
And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.
… Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.
Most permaonline ‘hardcore’ gamers, people you see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming ‘journalists’, and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers… they’re all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.
This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.
Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.
At this point, the disparity is so extreme that I would not be surprised if GTA 6 more or less ends up being the beginning of the end of Rockstar.
People are not going to be able to pay the prices they will need to charge for their basically ‘decade of investment’ game that primarily serves as an MTX platform.
The performance issues are a major one for me, nothing worse than firing up a new game and getting 40fps with tons of stuttering along the way.
I feel like most newer games also have trouble with low/medium settings not really being that much better for performance, so there’s no fix for it.
I remember older games where low was like staring at a character made from 12 polygons and everything looked awful, but it would run on just about anything.
Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.
They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don’t.
A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?
Yeah, they’re now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.
Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.
Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and on one level, I don’t blame them, it is absurdly complex.
Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics… while also being more performant, running on older hardware.
Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you’re not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.
EDIT: 12 polygons you say?
Runs on anything, you say?
… ok, hear me out:
What if there is more to a video game than just how graphically realistic it is… what if it could be immersive, convincing, memorable, complex, not totally railroad you through a blatently OP power fantasy, linear story, even make the player really think about some real world serious shit, while also having a bit of goofy levity from time to time?
Man if there was a game like that, you’d have to reinstall it or something, sheesh.
(This entire game fits on a single CD ROM, btw, less than 750 MB)
While I have no love for a lot of modern AAA devs, Threat Interactive is not an authority on whatever he preaches. No games shipped, only some UE5 snake oil config files. No proof of any experience or credibility, just bashing. I wouldn’t watch that stuff or bring it up as some sort of authority on 3D graphics.
Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn’t worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn’t any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.
Hah! And here I am at a company where everyone does premature optimisations, that end up killing performance because they make the actually needed performance optimisations impossible without major refactoring.
to your GTA 6 point: i will not be buying it until it releases on pc. rumor is, and history agrees, that it will be a console only release for like a year. and even then im gonna borrow it first to see if its worth a shit before paying a dime. and i might not pay even if i do like it lol