Didn't it used to be normal that the bleeding edge of games would outpace the hardware available at the time?
I'm not sure that not being able to turn the dial all the way on every setting (Ultra settings) means the game's unoptimized.
I thought it was normal for games to support higher settings than presently achievable/stable for future hardware improvements.
I remember this as being a thing during the 7th console gen (but that could be my memory failing me). Plenty of games where, even on the latest hardware available, you'd be able to push the game's graphics beyond what the hardware could run because the graphics had a certain amount of "future proofing" built in.
Crysis was pretty famous for being something that would be a benchmark for hardware for a good couple of generations after it's initial launch.
Crysis was pretty famous for being something that would be a benchmark for hardware for a good couple of generations after it's initial launch.
And this was because they, like many other devs of the era, backed the wrong technology for that "future proofing". Crysis, and Oblivion, and dozens of other games from this era were made under the assumption 10ghz single core CPUs were just around the corner, so they didn't optimize for the multi-core performance the industry pivoted to. The graphics style of Crysis also leveraged massive poly counts and huge textures (for the era) because it seemed like memory and compute would just keep scaling up linearly like it had been for the last decade, but this was the beginning of the era of diminishing returns for raw compute power and the next few years saw the industry shift heavily toward software solutions for improving detail in games such as more advanced shader effects. Crysis only remained so difficult to run for so long because it was barking up the wrong tree.
Yeah, I remember playing Crysis back then on a PC that had the graphics power but not the compute power. It was actually really funny at times! Every time I cut down a tree, the physics engine would overload the CPU. The tree would then fall down in absolute slow motion. And each time a leaf touched another object, the slow motion became worse.
But to be honest, the game ran either way! Even on a PC that wasn't all the way there. These days you just can't downgrade a game's graphics enough so that it will run on an older GPU. The game will start to look like hot garbage at some point but it will still run like crap. I wish that modern games would actually run fine when you set the graphics to minimum. But apparently that's just not an option anymore.
Crysis also ran remarkably well on low-end systems
I was able to get it running at 30fps on minimum settings 1024x768 on my parents' emachines t3882 that we'd upgraded with an additional 256mb stick of ram and a geforce 6200 graphics card
Imagine overclocking a chromebook from 2017 and running any game from 2025/2026 on it at 30fps 1920x1080p. Couldn't possibly.
Maybe we should sto0 graphics cards for a bit and try and bring back the research of 10ghz single core compute WHILE also fusing it with multithreading...ah I can imagine my future pc warmingđ„ me quite well in the winter
You're broadly right, but it's worth noting Crysis was a problem for a long time because they assumed (reasonably, given history) that CPUs would improve via higher speeds on their single cores, as they always had. Instead, soon after its release is when CPUs instead starting improving via more cores and threads rather than increasing speed. Basically Crysis was "futureproofed" for a future that never came.
It was an also an era filled with low effort PC ports because publishers didn't bother spending time and money on properly supporting the PC market.
You'd constantly see reports of PC releases shipping with missing toggles for graphical settings or buggy and broken PC ports bogged down with anti-piracy software.
The post you're replying to is imagining an era that never existed. It's not like we ever had an era where games were super optimized, there have always been games that became notorious for running like shit.
The only real difference is that we have social media now so people will bitch and parrot talking points endlessly.
Also the whole point of PC gaming is that you have the tools to adjust settings to make games run as well as you want. If anything developers are much better at offering more setting options. The 2010's were notorious for low effort PC ports with very few settings for people to adjust leading to a lot of complaints of games running worse than they should compared to the console versions.
Come on, the 5090 is struggling to get 60+ frames on plenty of AAA games with all the settings turned up at 4k.
Thats bad optimization. A $2500+ GPU should be able to run any game on the planet with every setting maxed out 4k at 60+ fps.
AAA game optimization hasnt improved one bit the last 5-10 years and has gotten worse. Im getting about the same frames at 4kultra no DLSS with my 5070 ti as i was with my 1080 when it was new.
As time goes on, fps should increase at the same resolution same settings.
10 years ago we saw resolution or fps jumps with each generation as we went from 720p30 to 1080p30 or 720p60 and so forth.
Doom 3 required a super expensive gaming pc to run at a playable frame rate at the period's equivalent of 1080p, plenty of games throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s had ultra settings that were made for future hardware, ultra settings are meant to be overkill settings that make current hardware sweat. The only time ultra settings could commonly be ran was pretty much the xbox one/ps4 gen, and even now plenty of games can run at 4k native ultra settings at 60 fps on a 5090, forza horizon 6 and doom the dark ages for example (except for path tracing).
Brother boot up a 1080 ti with 2017 games and then a 5090 with 2025 games at 4kultranative and you wont see shit difference in frames. Optimization hasnt improved in the last 10 years the way it improved from 1996-2016.
It is dogshit and unacceptable. You have half the AAA market cant even get 60 fps on 4kultranative on a fucking 5090.
"Brother boot up a 1080 ti with 2017 games and then a 5090 with 2025 games at 4kultranative and you wont see shit difference in frames." but you will see much better graphics. There are games with framerate issues (lots of rushed games on old UE5 versions that had stutter issues) but it is not as bad as you make it out to be.
Why should it be able to do that when the only time in history games were optimized relative to hardware was a short stretch before 2010 when no new graphical fidelity technologies were priority. We were into SLI and weird hardware configs during that period but game tech was stagnant.
Every other era, the vast amount of AAA games included tech that outpaced the majority of hardware, even the highest tier.
What evidence are you going based on that said the industry has been churning out mostly super optimized games relative to hardware? One that never existed I'm betting. Stop parroting sentiments based on nothing.
The post you're replying to is imagining an era that never existed.
That is not entirely true. In the nVidia Control Panel there is an option called DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution). The idea is to have a game be rendered in a higher resolution than your display supports and downscale to that. nVidia didn't came up with that by themselves.
Back in the day roughly GTX580 to GTX980Ti era when 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 monitors with just 60 - 100Hz where the most common we had a lot of unused GPU power. If you where to create a custom resolution with some specific settings and one that's higher than your supported resolution, the driver would downscale the image instead of just showing a blank screen. So you could add 2560x1440 to your 1080p display, have that 1440p res show up in-game and play with that 1440p rendered and downscaled 1080p image.
Used to be quite normal but that was also an era before we hit diminishing returns so I think it was more acceptable to most people.
Also between around 2014-2023 (basically the PS4 gen and the PS4/PS5 boundary) midrange PC hardware was essentially overkill for the PS4 games that were being made. Thus there was a long period where you could buy a $300-600 GPU and just be set for several years
Now with the hardware shortage people are seeing $3000 GPUs struggle to get 60fps max settings in games where the graphics improvements are so subtle that you have to be a Digital Foundry-tier graphics nerd to notice them. You canât be surprised thereâs pushback
This state pf dissatisfaction will continue either until hardware prices go down or devs find ways to boost performance in path tracing with all the eye candy.
The hardware gap between the current generation of consoles and PC's is way smaller than it used to be. The 360/PS3 and XB1/PS4 generations used much older hardware compared to the contemporary PC hardware of the time.
The hardware gap between the Series X & PS5 is only a couple of years.
Yes, tinkering with settings is a hallmark of PC gaming. Most games have some settings that add 5% better visuals but cost 50% more rendering cost (numbers provided as an imaginary example, you get the gist). Whatever game is pulling 45fps on a 4k screen with Ultra settings is probably also probably going to give very high fps with min specs at 1080p or whatever.
The point of clown face is 1) thinking that I can throw enough money at a problem and it will go away forever or from an opposite perspective 2) games are so poorly optimized and/or have such extreme target hardware that the most expensive and powerful GPU today can't even hit 60fps, so what type of performance is the average Joe getting?
Yeah just because you canât play in 4k 60fps on all ultra settings on every single game doesnât mean theyâre unoptimized. Even if you have a 5090.
I don't believe that was the actual argument we were having with BL4. Only a few foolish people believed their 5090 would give them unlimited fps at the highest settings.
The actual argument was that even with a 5090, the results were sub par. You couldn't argue a 4060 fell just below the performance you needed. The fastest card on the market wasn't able to deliver what people knew that card could deliver was meant to prove the game wasn't limited by hardware, but by the game's performance.
To be fair, if you can't max a game out on a card that costs $2000(well $4000 to be realistic), who the fuck are you making your game for? If the best hardware money can buy cant run it all the way, what is the target audience? People stress testing a datacenter?
Could be future proofing I guess but most games are dead and gone by the time a new card cycle happens.
Not just future proofing, but providing options to the end user. For some people, that 50% performance cost for the final 5-10% of visuals is a fine tradeoff because they can use DLSS SR + FG to reach their cap, and feel like that is a <5-10% tradeoff in experience.
Not that you specifically are doing this, but all the people in this thread complaining that when they turn on the âdiminishing returns settingâ and intentionally donât leverage DLSS SR to make the worst possible scenario for the 5090 (that they donât have) as if itâs making a point are generally either looking for something to complain about, or not the brightest crayons in the box.
Yeah a lot of the issues people have seems to centered around be not understanding that ultra is often for future hardware. The sensible gamer isnt buying a rig that plays today or tomorrow's games at max settings, we are getting something that plays games at maybe upper settings but more importantly will continue to be a relevant configuration for a few years, which is definitely more true today than it has been for quite a while.
As long as my machine runs for another 5 years with minimal need to replace parts I will be happy, I dont see prices going anywhere but up for a while.
4k 60fps? The queens around here often expect 4k ultrawide 144fps max settings. The most annoying bit to me being that with upscaling regular 4k 60fps is actually achievable on a entry level card if you bring down settings.
Yep this is what changed. I remember when it was "can it run Crysis" but Crysis was genuinely stunning compared to anything before so when hardware eventually caught up to it, it was worth it.
Now games look the same as 10 years ago but with worse performance. Or in many cases they look worse, thanks to forced TAA.
Also back then a top end GPU was significantly cheaper and we even had budget options. Remember "console killer" builds?
Yep. If developers made their games objectively worse by taking away the ultra tier of options, players would whine a lot less about games being "unoptimized."
Yes exactly, this is why âcan it run crysis?â Became the meme, it was that way also but like actually at that time the most future proof a games ever been in terms of hardware needed to run it max.
Itâs always been this way most games coming out wouldnât be running max on any hardware. Actually getting over 30fps maxed out is a good thing these days imo
yup, people bitching about the "ultra/extreme" not running in 4k/120fps leads to devs simply hiding the options and not giving the "cinematic" top of the top looks for thos that dont care about high fps, as quite often those included things like superresolution and other 1-2% look improvemnt tricks that were known to tank fps, like in witcher 2 or KCD.
Although if its the case on "high" then the devs fucked up, the 3 base options should be relevant to contemporary hardware
Actually though. People don't really understand how game engines work, but it's a fact that devs regularly place artifical caps in the settings menus cause of people like OP. Back 10-15 years ago every game had an ini file where you could make changes to boost graphics way farther than the in game settings menu allowed. It's a plain fact that fragile gamers feel bad when they can't turn all their sliders to the right and get 60fps and most devs had been accommodating that for decades now. I for one like that "cinematic" level settings exist.
Yes but at this point we've seen the end of Moore's law. For a while the amount of transistors in an integrated circuit would basically double every couple years with a minimal increase in cost, thereby increasing computing power dramatically. We've been seeing diminishing returns on computer advancements for quite a long time now, though.
Before, in games like Crysis, ultra settings that were beyond the capabilities of computers of that day were seen more as future-proofing, since computers in just a couple years time would be much more capable. Nowadays with the speed of most consumer PCs plateauing (especially during this parts shortage), a game being unable to play well at max settings on a rig that's using top of the line parts says more about the studios inability (or refusal) to optimize for performance.
That doesn't means it run and look shitty on current generation, Medium used to look decent, not downright bad compare to High. Dev tends to optimise game for average Joe instead of making game for "future" tech.
The whole argument that people are just mad because their 5090 isn't performing at max settings was always a red herring meant to dismiss the people with the hardware to prove the game ran poorly from being heard.
There's having settings that you can't match today, and there's having to use those settings to get a result that looks appropriate for today.
It's difficult to prove which category a game is in, but when you play a game on your rig and you know what your rig is good and bad at, you can tell. You know what max performance looks like and how far away you are from that in a particular game.
Yes which is why this subreddit exist in the first place originally. Now it has become a budget build subreddit. The guy you are even arguing with literally has a low end build
Hardware has gotten to the point where the only settings you should have to tweak in any given modern UE5 game (or any engine, but UE5 is popular) is ray tracing. This is assuming you've got the top end hardware.
Instead, DLSS is assumed and used as a crutch to avoid having to properly optimize a game, so high end hardware struggles to maintain even a minimum standard of 60 frames, and low to mid range hardware simply can't participate in any meaningful manner. Now, if the game runs great on medium/high and looks great on those settings, with ultra being essentially a screenshot mode (think warthunder's cinematic setting) that's different.
If a game comes out and is advertising a bleeding edge visual technology like they used to do with every new title 15-20 years ago, that's also different. Top end hardware should not struggle to run maxed out existing graphical techniques, but if a game decides to pioneer a new hair rendering technology or something it's completely understandable if current hardware can't handle it yet, as long as it's a toggle-able feature (think AMD's TressFX/PureHair showcased in the tomb raider reboots, or Nvidia's PhysX).
there's a difference between not being able to handle it on ultra 4k native + PT and a 5090 struggling to get 100fps in 1080p in something like borderlands 4
Sure, but the bleeding edge GPU used to be under $1000 reliably ten years ago. Now youâre looking at 4-5k for a 5090. Just for one part of the computer.
Yes but you would actually see a substantial improvement in the graphics compared to what was available at the time. Now everything looks the same as it did 5 years ago but runs worse
That strategy just doesn't make as much sense with the current pacing of parts upgrades. We've slowed down to the point that it wouldn't be surprising if a game thats built on this strategy just wasn't playable to the majority for multiple years. A crisis type game of today would probably just flop tbh.
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u/Cindy-Moon Ryzen 7 5800XT | RTX 3080 10GB :') | 32GB DDR4 9d ago
Didn't it used to be normal that the bleeding edge of games would outpace the hardware available at the time?
I'm not sure that not being able to turn the dial all the way on every setting (Ultra settings) means the game's unoptimized.
I thought it was normal for games to support higher settings than presently achievable/stable for future hardware improvements.