2mo ago

I hate the current push towards insane graphical requirements in PC games

Currently trying to refund the new Indiana Jones game because it's unplayable without raytracing

. My card isn't even old, it's just 8GB of VRAM is the absolute minimum apparently so my mobile 3060 is now useless. I miss when I used to be able to play new games in 2014 on my shitty AMD card at 20fps, yeah it didn't look great but developers still included a very low graphics option for people like me. Now you need to be upgrading every 2 years to keep up.

98 comments

that one is atrocious but another thing i also find nasty is the amount of disk space new games need. sure, buying more disks is way cheaper than getting more graphical power but downloading +100Gb for a game I might just play once feels like an incredible waste
games should have a lo-fi version where they use lower textures and less graphical features for the people that cannot actually see the difference in graphics after the ps2 era
- Rainbow 6 Siege had to downgrade map assets because the skins take up too much space lol
  
  Cosmetics is a wholly separate clown-show. Dota 2 used to be a few gigabytes in space. Now because of all the hats it's like 30gb compressed.
- War Thunder (garbage game, don't play) does this. You can choose to download higher quality textures. I don't care, I haven't noticed the difference
  
  The snail yearns for your money
  
  war thunder bad?
- There's been a couple games I've decided to just not buy because the disk space requirement was too high. I don't think they care much about a single lost sale, unfortunately.
- it's not just texture quality, game devs also throw in TONS of unused assets that just live on the disk and don't do anything. i think GTA V is about half just unused assets.

There are some good videos out there that also explain how UE5 is an unoptimised mess. Not every game runs on UE5 but it's the acceptable standard for game engines these days
- That and DX12 in general, in my experience. Almost every game where I've had the option to use DX11 instead of DX12, the difference has been night and day. Helldivers 2 especially had an absurd improvement for me.
- Can you link some, that sounds very interesting.
  
  I also would like to see them
  
  This is the main one I saw. It's kind of an as for this guy's game company, but clouds in a skybox shouldn't cause performance issues https://youtu.be/6Ov9GhEV3eE
- It's optimized around dev costs and not performance, sadly.

I'm finding the latest in visual advancements feels like a downgrade because of image quality. Yeah all these fancy technologies are being used but its no good when my screen is a mess of blur, TAA, artifacting from upscaling or framegen. My PC can actually play cyberpunk with path tracing but i can't even begin to appreciate the traced paths WHEN I CAN'T SEE SHIT ANYWAY.
Currently binging forza horizon 4 which runs at 60fps on high on my steam deck and runs 165fps maxed on my PC with 8x msaa and it looks beautiful. And why is it beautiful? Its because the image is sharp where I can actually see the details the devs put into the game. Also half life alyx another game that is on another level with crisp and clear visuals but also ran on a 1070ti with no issues. Todays UE5 screen vomit can't even compare
All games these days know is stutter, smeary image, dx12 problems and stutter
- TAA, dof, chromatic aberration, motion blur, vignetting, film grain, and lens flare. Every modern dev just dumps that shit on your screen and calls it cinematic. Its awful and everything is blurry. And sometimes you have to go into an ini file because it's not in the settings.
  
  Chromatic aberration! When I played R&C: Rift Apart on PS5 I was taking screenshots and genuinely thought there was some kind of foveated rendering in play because of how blurry the corners of the screen looks. Turns out it was just chromatic aberration, my behated.
  Hate film grain too because I have visual snow and I don't need to stack more of that shit in my games.
- I despise TAA. I remember back when I played on PS4, I could immediately spot a UE4 game because they almost always had awful TAA ghosting.

All of the boomer game devs that had to code games for like a 486 have now retired, replaced with people who nVidia or AMD can jangle shiny keys in front of to make their whole games around graphics tech like cloth physics and now ray tracing.
- I just want to punch nazis why does it have to matter if the reflection of a pigeon off screen appears in Indiana Jones' eyes??
  
  Because it sells and they like monies
- This is why solo or small team indie devs are the only devs I give a shit about. Good games that run well, are generally cheap, and aren't bloated messes.

I want my games to be able to be rendered in software, I want them to be able to run on a potato from the early 2000s and late 90s, is this too much for a girl to ask for
- Todd Howard made Morrowind run on 64MB of RAM in a cave. With a box of scraps.

I just want ps2-level graphics with good art direction (and better hair, we can keep the nice hair) and interesting gameplay and stories. Art direction counts for so much more than graphics when it comes to visuals anyway. There are Playstation 1 games with good art direction that imo are nicer to look at than some "graphically superior" games.
- What hair in modern games looks like
  
  when u see a Homo Sapiens for the first time
  
  Yeah i would much rather a hairstyle be a single solid texture than whatever the fuck this "HAIRFX individual hair rendering 9000" bullshit is, that always ends up looking like trash

This is part of why I've pretty much stopped following mainstream releases. Had to return Space Marine 2 because it would not stop crashing and the low settings looked like absolute dogshit

I got a special fucking bone to pick with Cities Skylines 2. I've never had a game look like such vaseline-smeared ass while making my computer sound like it's about to take off. It's a shame because it's definitely come a long way as a game and has some really nice buildings now, but to play it I start to get nervous after like half an hour and have to let my computer cool down, fuck that shit.
- There's a number of YouTube videos examining how CS2 was designed in such a shockingly bad way to murder your GPU

Yeah, I'm getting real fucking tired of struggling to get 60fps in new games even with DLSS cranked to max. They don't even look much better. There's plenty of older games that look better and run better that you don't need to subject yourself to DLSS ghosting and frame gen latency to play. I've been telling my main co-op buddy that I might just stop playing new games (at least larger releases) because this shit is so frustrating.
- DLSS created an excuse for developers to throw optimization to the side and just do whatever they please. I figured this is what would happen when it was created and it’s definitely happening now. I’m glad that I don’t play AAA games for the most part, cause this shit sounds annoying.
- Unlimited 720p renderer on the dlss world
- I decided I'm not gunna' play any game that isn't released on PS4 or Switch. My PC isn't really powerful enough to play PS5-exclusive games anyway, so that sets a similar hard-limit. I was gunna' decide no game post-2020 but this choice made more sense.
  I remember reading an article by Cosmo about music/metal on his ex-blog Invisible Oranges about how since we have a limited amount of time on Earth we're all making limits or acting within limits like these anyway. Some are just more conscious of it than others, so it shouldn't be treated as weird for someone to consciously decide they want to engage with a hobby in a specific manner like this.
  
  I'm in a similar boat but I'm letting my budget dictate what I play instead. Tekken 8 looks cool but why pay $70+DLC when I have Tekken 7, also very cool, for $6? I'm always a version behind but my wallet thanks me.
  Also Peggle is extremely cheap and I've gotten an RPG number of hours out of that series.

if a game can't run on everything people have run Doom on, i don't want to play it
- yes this includes the digital pregnancy test and the parking ticket validator

duke nukem: that's a lot of ~~words~~ VRAM. too bad i'm not buyin it.
seriously, i hate this shit. i have a 1080 ti that i got used several years ago when the market had hit a bit of a lull and it's got some firmware bug that stops it from running most modern games, even ones it h as enough vram to run. this is why indie games and old games that people are still making mods or private server sets for like cod4 are so great.
- My 1080 kept having performance issues with each update. I had to revert to an older driver in order to get anything to work. Nvidia and whatever game devs blamed each other for the issue, so I haven't figured out why it was happening.

The gamers yearn for Forward+ rendering...
Yeah i think gaming as an industry is becoming 'more specialized' which is not necessarily good. All the engine developers are just working on very generic graphics stuff for like Unreal and Unity, rather than engine devs being a position at a company that makes games themselves, which can greatly optimize them for specific games.

My CPU is 12 years old and my GPU 7. So yeah... I’m gonna stick with indie and older games.

People were saying this about Morrowind
- Yeah but they were right, Morrowind looks too good, every game should look like Cruelty Squad
- They were kind of correct back then two with the amount of upgrading the industry would expect you to do. That just petered off there for a while, luckily. seems to be back in full force now though
  That said, at least back then all the shit gave you actual functionalities as per graphics instead of like raytracing on retinas or some bullshit you'd never notice
  
  I think that has to do with consoles: when a console generation is outdated mid or low range hardware that forces more general optimization and less added bullshit, especially when that generation drags on way too long and means devs are targeting what is basically a decade old gaming computer towards the end. When they're loss leaders and there's a shorter window between generations or upgraded same-generation versions, it means devs are only optimizing enough to run on a modern mid range gaming rig and specifically the console configuration of that.
- Can confirm

The new indiana jones is actually pretty decently optimized, like I run it at 1080p all high/ultra settings on my rtx 3060 12gb, with DLAA downscaling enabled at a mostly locked 60fps. Like it is leagues better than any UE5 game, it's just the hard VRAM requirements that suck.
I feel like a lot of the issues game graphics have nowadays is just that GPU prices have been ridiculously inflated over the last two decade because of crypto/ai. Like it is not surprising that devs will follow the newest trends and technologies when it comes to graphics, but the hardware needs of raytracing and global illumination and the likes are just too high for what gpu performance/dollar you can get in 2024. I just recently upgraded from an AMD RX480 to a used Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB (which seemed to be the best bang for the buck, an RTX 4060 would have been much more expensive for not a lot more performance), and that upgrade gets you maybe double performance in your games, for a GPU that is a whole seven years newer (and no VRAM upgrade at all when you get the base model). These cards just simply shouldn't cost as much as they do. If you don't have unlimited money to spend, you are going to have a much worse experience today compared to half a decade or a decade ago.

I've said this before but Fallout 4 came out nearly 10 years ago. And in a just world there would have been 3 New Vegas style spin off sequels of variable quality and a 4th on its way.

I am lucky enough that I'm not that interested in high-specs AAA titles to begin with: of the 100+ games I've put on a DIY wishlist, I'd say less than 10 of them fall in this category. It's mostly indie/retro titles, older titles or mid-budget.

This kind of thing is why consoles are so popular. No need to worry about insane specs, graphics card prices, etc, you just buy the console and it's good for 6-9 years.
- I'm pretty sure that's on the way out. Up until PS2/Xbox/Gamecube you bought the game and then you played the game. Then came installing the games on your console and managing disk space and shit. Now there's pro versions and graphical settings in console games. By the time the next generation from now is in place, it's just gonna be like choosing prebuilt PCs and futzing around with graphical settings all the same, except on way more locked hardware.
  
  Yeah I had to return Cyberpunk on my original PS4 because it was unplayable compared to the fancier versions.

video games need to go back to looking like halo 1
pre-rendered cutscenes should look like gta 4
- All games should go back to looking, playing, and being Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
- every game should just be made with the same engine as doom 2016. it looks amazing, runs really smooth on modest hardware, and it isn't unreal engine 5
  frostbite engine too. battlefield looks amazing, and runs really well on modest/mid tier hardware. i actually thought the new indiana jones WAS running on the battlefield engine just based on how it looked. but apparently not
  
  Fox Engine is incredible and it’s a shame only a couple games were made with it.

I have been pleasantly surprised that Path of Exile 2 runs at a pretty stable 40fps on my 6 year old GPU so long as I keep global illumination off. But other games have been a complete crapshoot like Returnal and Death Stranding.
- I'm doing the electric archer build and if I drop too many lightning rods and start chaining lightning like 50x it gets real stuttery and I have a 3070ti, probably will have to adjust settings as I get further in the game
  
  That's probably the spammiest build in the game, and I'd be surprised if that's GPU bound. Maybe the particles are a problem without dynamic culling. But otherwise that's probably a CPU bound thing.

I’ve heard that you can leave on most of the settings (except path tracing) and turn down the texture size/cache setting and it should run fine on 8GB cards.
- I believe the problem is that the card in question has less than 8 gigs of VRAM
  
  Yee I'm stuck on a 6GB card so im SOL

current? we've been on this path since everything became 3d in the 90s

I feel like that trend is actually past us. Maybe I haven’t followed gaming too closely but there doesn’t seem to be a benchmark game that is as overwhelmingly demanding, considering the landscape of tech during its time, as something like Crysis.
The most popular games nowadays don’t seem to be prohibitively demanding for commonly bought pcs. Maybe im wrong
- nah, the problem is that they are demanding, but don't push boundaries graphically at all - due to absolutely no optimisation.
  i know i really shouldn't play this slop, but Black Ops 6 legitimately looks worse that new-MW3 but requires me to massively turn settings down to achieve similar framerates/avoid hitching compared to the game it literally replaced. I may as well be playing a game from 10 years ago, and I have a 3070 and ryzen 5000 series cpu. barely anything i've played in the last 5 years looks "boundary-pushing amazing", save for maybe Control which was more down to how it used certain effects i guess
  i know i'm talking about activision, but it's not unique to them and their shitty engine. Halo Infinite looked like ass and ran worse. I didn't even play Starfield because lmao bethesda engine. Shit like Dead by Daylight even takes up 50gb. And i know they blow every single game launch, but given that Frostbite can look very good in some settings, BF2042 was an ugly, empty mess to the point that it killed the game harder that BFV. basically all AAA devs have regressed to inserting the slop into engines cobbled together 15 years ago and releasing games that would immediately crash if anything was compressed because treatpigs (like me) just accept 100gb installs and having to juggle what game you can play each week
- There is some boundary pushing, but I feel like the time period between 2005 and 2015 was like... If you had a two year old graphics card you'd struggle with the latest games. Or something. Certainly, a 5 year old graphics card in 2005 would have been rough (as some people mention in this thread).
  I think graphics cards have comparatively gotten more expensive though, compared to the rest of the computer.

mobile 3060
If your using a laptop you need to do maintenance on it. If you don't reapply thermal paste/pads and clean your fans your GPU and CPU will throttle.
2nd addressing the thread more generally if you have a 1440p or 4k monitor you will struggle. Lowing resolution is a very quick way to get performance. This is why the steam deck and switch are 720p screens. My laptop is a 3k monitor and have to downscale any game I play on it.
Also "can it run crysis?" was a thing almost 20 years ago now
- What resolution is 3k?
  
  "3K" doesn't translate to any specific resolution, and it's exclusively a thing in higher end laptops afaik. Anything from 2560x1600 to 2736 x 1824 to 2880x1620 to 3260x1834 or other totally random display resolutions are marketed under this label.
  Totally unusable terminology.

I'm replaying Half Life 2 and it loads and plays like a song. Try playing some old games, Half Life 2 still plays great.

no game needs to look more realistic than MGSV. we shoulda just stopped there
- That's def where we peaked for sure

My card isn't even old
It's about 4 years old, which is pretty old for an entry tier card to be running the latest triple AAA titles. My Radeon 7770 was only three years old when The Witcher 3 came out and it couldn't hit minimum spec. Only two years for AC: Unity but that was especially demanding
I do think now is an awkward time where we're shifting to new tech that isn't quite ready for prime time, but it's never going to be until we shift to it
- Yea that's fair, it's just hard to think of it being outdated when I paid so much for it. Also it's the first time I've experienced VRAM size being the chokepoint of what I can run, but maybe that's just the new normal.
  
  Yeah it feels arbitrary, especially given how cheap VRAM is. Common Nvidia L (not that they care given the stacks they're making with data centers)

There are so many games that don't have this problem. How about you play those?

Yes, I just got a new laptop with 16GB of RAM but it still struggles with a lot of games also I downloaded Zenless Zone Zero a month ago (no it's not a Gooner game the Fanservice is quite mild) and it gobbled up 50 goddamn gigabytes off my 2TB hard drive everything is so badly optimized this is Ridiculous
- (no it’s not a Gooner game the Fanservice is quite mild)
  My "it's not a Gooner game" t-shirt has people asking me a lot of questions already answered by the shirt
- no it's not a Gooner game
  For you.
  
  It's not a Gooner game, it just has Hot Characters they aren't pushy with it in-game (but they are in the Promo material)

I'm having the opposite experience with Indiana Jones, I expected it to be unplayable on my mobile 3060 but in fact it runs great. I had to set a weird launch option that I found on protobdb but once I did that it went from unplayable under 10fps to a smooth 60fps in 1080p
Try enabling this setting
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__GL_13ebad=0x1

The price of storage dropping quickly ruined optimization, so things turned from "how do I get the most out of a tiny bit of space" to "Fuck you. Upgrade your gear!"

I look at system requirements now and I have no idea how my current hardware even compares to what's listed. AAA PC gaming has moved beyond me monetarily lol

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