New games that look awful and run terrible on the most powerful systems

Warden of the North

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Apr 28, 2006
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Is anyone else annoyed by this trend of new games that look and run terrible on the worlds most powerful consoles? Like how is this acceptable? I'll point to three new games in the past little while which all suffer from this. PUBG, State of Decay 2, and Conan Exiles. They look like games from the last console generation and perform quite janky.

Why are these games performing so badly even on an Xbox One X (or PS4 in the case of Conan)? Compared to games like The Witcher 3, Arhkam Knight, Monster Hunter, Horizon etc they look awful and perform worse.
 

aleshemsky83

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Apr 8, 2008
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State of Decay 2, if it really is running like crap, there's no excuse. It's a first party game. It should run smoothly and bug free.

Pubg is self explanatory. It's always run terribly, the game was basically an experiment in the beginning with stock unreal engine assets. It literally only became an Xbox one exclusive because of Sony's lack of early access program (not that there aren't some horribly performing games on the console).

Conan exiles I'm not sure.

But as for the games that run well, they're from respected studios that have been making games for a long time, with the exception of witcher 3 (which got patched for a year and a half before it hit a locked 30 fps)
 

Osprey

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Feb 18, 2005
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This is nothing new for PC gaming. Many developers don't put in enough time to optimize games for PC prior to release. Now, it seems that some aren't even optimizing them enough for consoles. Welcome to our world. Maybe console gamers will start doing what PC gamers have long done and wait for patches, rather than buy games on release day.
 

CBJx614

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May 25, 2012
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Pubg is still in early release and isn't even a finished product yet, which is part of the reason it runs poorly. But I haven't had any issues with it on my xb1x.
 

Commander Clueless

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Sep 10, 2008
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Optimization is becoming less and less of a priority as time goes on, and it sucks. We've come to accept the lack of it in many ways.

Even one of the games you mentioned on the good example side, Arkham Knight, was notoriously poorly optimized for PC. Fortunately, they've fixed that problem.

It's funny, because a little bit of optimization can go a long way.
 

aleshemsky83

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Apr 8, 2008
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Optimization is becoming less and less of a priority as time goes on, and it sucks. We've come to accept the lack of it in many ways.

Even one of the games you mentioned on the good example side, Arkham Knight, was notoriously poorly optimized for PC. Fortunately, they've fixed that problem.

It's funny, because a little bit of optimization can go a long way.
This gen is far more optimized than last imo. I think framerates are just more of a topic of conversation now vs in the past.
 

Commander Clueless

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This gen is far more optimized than last imo. I think framerates are just more of a topic of conversation now vs in the past.

I think you may be right in general, but in the latter half of this generation I think it has started to slack off a bit...and I can't help but wonder if the success of Early Access is having an effect (two of the OP's examples have used it).

I will say we've seen a trend in consoles towards choice between frame rate and visuals, and I think that's great. Gives players the option to choose which they prefer.
 
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SeidoN

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Aug 8, 2012
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Arkham Knight, was notoriously poorly optimized for PC. Fortunately, they've fixed that problem.

"fixed" is a generous term

I hate getting excited for new releases but always having to worry in the back of my mind that I wont be able to play it because of optimization. I was SOOO excited for Dishonored 2 and it ran like trash, along with many other examples I could name
 

Commander Clueless

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"fixed" is a generous term

I hate getting excited for new releases but always having to worry in the back of my mind that I wont be able to play it because of optimization. I was SOOO excited for Dishonored 2 and it ran like trash, along with many other examples I could name

Oh really?

I played it not too long ago and it ran very well, whereas I couldn't even run it without crashing initially. Funny enough, it was the free game I got with my GPU at the time.

Mind you, I changed GPUs in between attempts, so that might have played a part.
 

SeidoN

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Oh really?

its alot better, but its still a polished turd. I finally went back and finished it a couple months back. it was... playable at that point but still suffered from frame drops in some areas and I had to drop the graphics a fair bit. I had a GTX1070 at the time so really not much excuse
 

Commander Clueless

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its alot better, but its still a polished turd. I finally went back and finished it a couple months back. it was... playable at that point but still suffered from frame drops in some areas and I had to drop the graphics a fair bit. I had a GTX1070 at the time so really not much excuse

Yeah, that's pretty bad. I'm using a 1080 and it wasn't exactly amazing, but certainly playable for me at 1440p and (mostly) 60FPS. My 980 Ti couldn't even run it when it came out.

I actually really enjoyed the game itself, despite being very angry at it back at release. :laugh:
 

SeidoN

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I actually really enjoyed the game itself, despite being very angry at it back at release. :laugh:

oh its a fantastic game (ignoring some of the repetitive sidequests) I really love the Arkham series but Knight left a sour taste for me. like I said im tired of great games being let down (often to the point of unplayability) by performance issues
 

SeidoN

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State of Decay 2, if it really is running like crap, there's no excuse.

im downloading it now. I have the Game Pass so might as well. I was gonna play coop with friends until I heard about the horrific coop mechanics but ill try it single player and it might be alright *shrug*
 

SeidoN

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im downloading it now. I have the Game Pass so might as well. I was gonna play coop with friends until I heard about the horrific coop mechanics but ill try it single player and it might be alright *shrug*

so I was ranting about bad performance in this game while showing it to a friend on discord screen share, but after i turned it off my performance was fine. 80fps on High, 55-65 Ultra

my only complaint (non-gameplay-wise) is the textures are a bit meh and the horrible motion blur needs an ini tweak to disable
 

Osprey

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Feb 18, 2005
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so I was ranting about bad performance in this game while showing it to a friend on discord screen share, but after i turned it off my performance was fine. 80fps on High, 55-65 Ultra

my only complaint (non-gameplay-wise) is the textures are a bit meh and the horrible motion blur needs an ini tweak to disable

I always turn off motion blur in games. First of all, I find it annoying. Your mind naturally blurs things that your eyes aren't focusing on. Games don't need to add artificial blur on top of that just to look cool. Second, it always seems to drag performance down noticeably. Games always play a whole lot more smoothly when I disable it.
 
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SniperHF

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but in the latter half of this generation I think it has started to slack off a bit...

Always happens. Usually it's in the name of making the games look as good as possible for sales at the cost of performance. But a lot of the popular games mentioned in this thread are amateur projects effectively.

I always turn off motion blur in games. First of all, I find it annoying. Your mind naturally blurs things that your eyes aren't focusing on; games don't need to add artificial blur on top of that just to look cool. Second, it always seems to drag performance down noticeably. Games always play a whole lot more smoothly when I disable it.

Depth of field is even worse, horrible. One of the best examples of why DoF is shit is Borderlands. It totally washes out the visual style of the game. Trying to mimic the human eye via an effect on a monitor is a waste of time.
 

Osprey

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Feb 18, 2005
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Depth of field is even worse, horrible. One of the best examples of why DoF is **** is Borderlands. It totally washes out the visual style of the game. Trying to mimic the human eye via an effect on a monitor is a waste of time.

Yeah, I usually turn off depth of field, as well, for the same reason. It's just blur based on distance, rather than motion, after all, and seems to have about the same effect on performance. Also, it's stupid when you actually want to look at something in the distance and it's horribly blurred. Sometimes, a developer will use it very subtly and sparingly and in a way that it actually improves depth perception, but most developers apply it far too heavily.

I recently played Far Cry 3, which is a 6-year-old game, and found that it had bad stutter, even though my card was easily good enough for it. I turned off depth of field and motion blur and the game became as smooth as silk. It was rather annoying that I had to make both changes in the INI file, though. Developers cripple their own games with these features and then don't always give you an easy way to uncripple them.
 
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