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.
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.