Thebonehead
Banned
I tried Star Citizen the other week - It ran like absolute dogshit :
31 - 55fps on my lowly rig ( 12900k, 32Gb, 4090, 6500Mbps m.2)
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13 Ways To End Lousy PC Ports in 2023-DF video
- Thread starter mansoor1980
- Start date
I tried Star Citizen the other week - It ran like absolute dogshit :
31 - 55fps on my lowly rig ( 12900k, 32Gb, 4090, 6500Mbps m.2)
Lysandros
Member
Well, an actual developer who worked on UE5 dared to respond to the very Great contesting (very respectfully of course) a few of his "Laws For a New Era of Proper PC Ports"
forum.beyond3d.com
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
Then the PC port is developed from there and designed for the corresponding PC configuration to get the best you can from that. But a dev making a simultaneous release, which configuration best represents the game you want to make? Console? A high end PC? Which PC configuration? XSX and PS5...
forum.beyond3d.com
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I don't know what this user's pedigree is, but he sounds like he mostly agrees with Alex's assessment.
Most of the points are good, fairly obvious, and uncontentious.
For the most part these things don't get fixed because of a lack of time and resources. This is what most of us assume. This is probably because the managers in charge don't think it's worth the cost/benefit to fix them. This is why Alex's video is important - to show them that these things ARE important, and that gamers do care about them.
The points he goes on to elaborate on aren't necessarily disagreeing with Alex. They're mostly adding a lot of context to the scope of the problems and how tricky they are to "solve".
Buggy Loop
Member
Seems like a typical autistic engineer who focus on the tree and not the forest.
No shit that some of the console settings will not even make sense on PC, Alex is not asking for pure parity, but if it’s possible like you actually do know the asset used on console is X, just refer to it in settings. Nobody is asking for botched ray tracing match with consoles, but when possible, do it? Again, God of War did it.
No shit that some FOV can be problematic. The whole essence of Alex’s complaints (outside of stutters) can be resumed like this : if a nobody can edit the ini files to get more tweaks, an hex registry to change FOV and widescreen easily, then fucking do it.
The Mario 64 RT dude implemented DLSS from the first day of release of the SDK within hours, there’s no convincing me that if you implemented TAA and have all the motion vectors that it’s a huge ask to support DLSS. Then even nobody’s can switch from DLSS to FSR 2 by switching files? Makes his argument even more stupid that he’s waiting on an universal solution.
That’s the problem with typical software engineers. They make it always look like it’s so much work, then a file swapping and ini edits and you get what you want..
I don’t care you hold yourself to a higher pool of knowledge because you’re a developer, I’m sure you know the backend better than anyone, the whole point is that from that same engine you created, nobodies are finding how to hack your game to have better features. You’re outdone from your laziness by script kiddies.
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Hugare
Member
My main problem is that Alex should have focused more on roasting publishers than devs
A lot of the video sounded like devs dont implement those stuff because they are oblivious or lazy. And as the guy said, those points are obvious for people working on the industry. The publishers are to blame.
Devs know that these things are important, but most of the time, they are working until the release date to make the freaking game work. Even optimization is an afterthought due to time constraints, let alone graphical features.
And about the publishers, well, 90% have shareholders to respond to. And if they want the return of their investments this year, devs have to suffer to deliver.
And for us its obvious that devs need more time, but 99% of the shareholders have never even played a game before. They only care about the money.
Tough problem to solve
Hugare
Member
Seems like a typical autistic engineer who focus on the tree and not the forest.
No shit that some of the console settings will not even make sense on PC, Alex is not asking for pure parity, but if it’s possible like you actually do know the asset used on console is X, just refer to it in settings. Nobody is asking for botched ray tracing match with consoles, but when possible, do it? Again, God of War did it.
No shit that some FOV can be problematic. The whole essence of Alex’s complaints (outside of stutters) can be resumed like this : if a nobody can edit the ini files to get more tweaks, an hex registry to change FOV and widescreen easily, then fucking do it.
The Mario 64 RT dude implemented DLSS from the first day of release of the SDK within hours, there’s no convincing that if you implemented TAA and have all the motion vectors that it’s a huge ask to support DLSS. Then even nobody’s can switch from DLSS to FSR 2 by switching files? Makes his argument even more stupid that he’s waiting on an universal solution.
That’s the problem with typical software engineers. They make it always look like it’s so much work, then a file swapping and ini edits and you get what you want..
I don’t care you hold yourself to a higher pool of knowledge because you’re a developer, I’m sure you know the backend better than anyone, the whole point is that from that same engine you created, nobodies are finding how to hack your game to have better features. You’re outdone from your laziness by script kiddies.
God of War, Days Gone, Spider-Man, all of them were made by a developer focused on porting games, many years after the original release
They werent working on 8 different SKUs at the same time, programming the game up until the release date, trying to make the damn thing work.
Comparing a port job with new releases is like apples to oranges
S0ULZB0URNE
Member
Can't stand that fucker.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
What about the video makes you think he wasn't?
Hugare
Member
Well, the whole video
It was directly aimed at developers, hence all the technical stuff. Devs know that these stuff are missing from their games. The focus should have been on why its missing.
Not because they are dumb, but because publishers force them to rush the game out of the door.
So I would have respected some rambling about how publishers fuck up by rushing devs waaay more thant he video we got
Buggy Loop
Member
I’m not sure we’re having the same experiences from these kind of comments.
I’m on ultrawide. Pc gaming wiki is basically a resume of small hacks to add features to games that devs have much easier access to. PC is filled with games that easily support flawless ultrawide, but devs didn’t. As if a publisher will give authorization to implement or not a setting as simple as this.
Script kiddies are fixing the game for you. There’s no amount of arguments in the world that will convince me it’s the publisher’s fault or that the poor poor dev had too much going on at the same time. You wouldn’t believe how many dumb peoples find their way into tech industries anyway, school is not a certificate that you’re smart, it’s a certificate that you can learn enough to pass exams. I’ve seen my share of engineers that bullshit their way to the top but don’t even know the fundamentals of what they’re talking about. Calling yourself a developer is not even raising a single hair of my body that I think there’s a fuckload of lazy ports by incompetent devs.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
How does that necessarily entail that it's directly aimed at them? Presumably, a manager/publisher/executive watching this video would need to be explained to why we care about these problems, and how (relatively) easy they are to fix, like the ones that even unpaid modders fix. This video does that.
Where in the video is the implication or direct insinuation that the developers are dumb? Looking at the transcript, he only says "developers" one time.
"One other tip I have here for shader compilation is that if there is going to be a lengthy pre-compilation step and you as a developer are worried about bad user experience while they wait for the
compilation to occur, then make it a pre-compilation that is interruptible or optional with a warning that the user will experience stutter if they choose not to wait for the pre-compilation to finish. Modern Warfare 2 does this nicely where you can kind of cancel and recompile shaders on demand with the click of a button I find that to be great design."
A snippet or two like that to balance the tone could have been useful.
Hugare
Member
Again, developers are always running against the clock to make the game work at launch. It's not about publishers giving them authorization, but giving them time.
I'm not a developer, but at work I have to juggle between 8 different stuff because I have to deliver them on a specific deadline imposed by my boss. Sometimes in order to do so I have to ignore small requests from other people. To them, I must be the laziest mf on my company. But I had to ignore it to deliver more important stuff.
Script kiddies are fixing the game for me on their spare time, working months or maybe years on a passion project.
Again, its like the intern delivering a report that I had to ignore in order to deliver more important stuff, and people going "see? the intern knows stuff that you dont". It's not fair.
Sure, Jen. Executive will watch Alex video and decide to say no to shareholders because they were oblivious to these problems until now.
And see the point about script kiddies above
He didnt say they ere dumb, but pointing stuff that should be better without context leaves a lot for interpretation
What Modern Warfare 2 has that many games doesnt? God knows how many devs working on a game with an absurd budget
I know that many developers sure as hell would love optional pre compilation on their games and etc., but its so much more complicated than that.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I'm confused about your priorities now. If you're pessimistic about the probability of executives standing up to shareholders, why are you so adamant about targeting them?
Not all of these fixes take months or years. Some of them are done fairly quickly.
Yes it does, and therefore interpreting this as an attack on devs and their integrity/intelligence isn't warranted, IMO.
PaintTinJr
Member
I've had a gaming capable PC since early 90's (Saboteur, Leader board Golf, Secret Agent Wolf, original Prince of Persia, 4D Sports Driving, etc) and all I can say about Alex's video is he isn't a PC gamer if he doesn't accept that this goes with the territory.
He's also in denial about the shader issue because despite him believing that PC will always outgun console, the shader issue is one emerging aspect, when combined with the GB/s streaming of assets on console, that creates a potential fork for developers as real next-gen games start to release.
AAA games - he's talking about - cost a couple of hundred million to make and a couple of hundred million to advertise to be highly successful on console release. PC doesn't pay for any of that risk - hence why AAA(and even some AA) gaming moved all their risk/reward strategy around console gaming, and see PC as low hanging fruit - extra money, that doesn't get a serious advertising campaign costing much, if any.
If developers are asked to give a hour pre-compilation on PC every time the user updates their drivers to live with the GB/s streaming on fixed closed hardware like PS5/XSeries, or leave stutter in the PC game with post release fixes where possible, the latter is the only option available that covers the costs, and this could be the death knell of the open million config gaming PC platform we see today, and Alex should brace himself IMHO.
He's also in denial about the shader issue because despite him believing that PC will always outgun console, the shader issue is one emerging aspect, when combined with the GB/s streaming of assets on console, that creates a potential fork for developers as real next-gen games start to release.
AAA games - he's talking about - cost a couple of hundred million to make and a couple of hundred million to advertise to be highly successful on console release. PC doesn't pay for any of that risk - hence why AAA(and even some AA) gaming moved all their risk/reward strategy around console gaming, and see PC as low hanging fruit - extra money, that doesn't get a serious advertising campaign costing much, if any.
If developers are asked to give a hour pre-compilation on PC every time the user updates their drivers to live with the GB/s streaming on fixed closed hardware like PS5/XSeries, or leave stutter in the PC game with post release fixes where possible, the latter is the only option available that covers the costs, and this could be the death knell of the open million config gaming PC platform we see today, and Alex should brace himself IMHO.
Buggy Loop
Member
No you couldn’t be more wrong. Since the dawn of programmable pipelines, this is an issue to port to PC. Nothing nothing to do with GB/s streaming. A flipper GPU from GameCube will still make a 4090 stutter because the programmable texturing unit was loading precompiled data from the disc straight to the pipeline without any cache/storage to compile it, it’s on the fly. PC has to emulate an architecture with programmable shaders and we have no way of precompiling this for the numerous hardware and drivers for all effects possible. So you have to stall the game to compile. No amounts of GB/s in the world will remove that, not even TB/s.
https://fr.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/?cr=fr
All this Cerny kool-aid for GB/s is getting to your head, not a single indicator is showing that tech on PC is holding back on this, even precious unreal 5 demos.
This I can sort of agree. Most port houses seem to be done by the junior team with low budgets.
Who the hell compiles shaders for an hour? Again, we have perfect examples of how it should be done. Nothing to do with their GB/s on fixed hardware. It’s the move to « metal » APIs. Dx11 also had a share of lazy devs, but with dx11 the Nvidia and AMD could fix the game via drivers because there’s many entry points in dx11 to manipulate. DX12 put all that work on devs.. and well yea, we see the difference between competent studios and incompetent ones.
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Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Don't gatekeep who is and isn't a "real" PC gamer.
Some degree of jankiness is expected for PC's myriad configurations, but that doesn't mean we can't expect a certain level of quality and features for a "finished" game being sold at full price. Most of these criticisms are not that hard to implement and are fairly reasonable.
An hour? These things don't take an hour.
PaintTinJr
Member
Without old style transition sections in games, or large preloading of areas like has been the case in all AAA games for a long time - the ones in the video he complimented too - there is no time gap to asynchronously compile in the background like he suggested., as there would be no constraint on how much to precompile if the paradigm is shifted to GB/s streaming with REYES (render everything your eyes see).
The flipper article I read when you posted it the other day in the other thread - and was an excellent read - isn't the same scenario. Precompiling shaders to simulate old Opengl1.6-ish shader abilities using lots of classic fixed pipelines isn't the same as trying to precompile shaders to simulate RDNA2 of Series or PS5's geometry engine, and even if they could achieve that, it would hamstring the further capabilities of those PC GPUs if they were using the precompiled Series/PS5 shaders to avoid stutter. In that scenario wouldn't it just be easier to buy a console?
UE5 demos don't use REYES and when I have to compile shaders for a change in the UE5 editor for altering shadows, etct it takes ages to precompile those shaders for the tiny demos even using a 12Core/24thread Xeon with 30MB of L3 cache. On I7 with 4 Cores/ 8threads it was taking 30mins.
Last-gen shaders are taking Alex 10mins IIRC, so true next-gen shaders with complex materials, lighting and lighting for a whole level or game world in advance is going to take at least 1hour IMO if async compiling isn't possible, as it wouldn't be in a true REYES scenario that Cerny described in Road to PS5.
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Comandr
Member
Just started playing OP Odyssey on pc and the shader compilation stutter is so annoying. I would be more than happy to wait a period of time in the beginning to avoid the constant hitching. And more visibly transparent graphical options? Absolutely yes. Show me what I’m actually changing. The days gone example is so good. It’s so annoying to tune a game by constantly going in and out of the menu to check FPS. Or god forbid I changed something that requires a restart. I’m certain that the majority of these issues don’t stem from ignorance, it’s apathy.
Alex is right to make a video about this. PC master race? Very often PC is a second class citizen with publishers and developers that just don’t give a shit once the product is launched, and for many purchasers, that’s already too late.
Alex is right to make a video about this. PC master race? Very often PC is a second class citizen with publishers and developers that just don’t give a shit once the product is launched, and for many purchasers, that’s already too late.
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PaintTinJr
Member
You are correct, and I probably wouldn't have said it if it wasn't for Alex using the video to gatekeep what is a good PC port to DF's massive following.
None of the issues he raises are close to the pitfalls pc gamers had to overcome in the past to get their gaming fix from PC, and despite those issues that negativity faded away quickly if the game experience was fun - say like configuring extended/expanded memory and a CD drive to work on a boot diskette for dos, before getting a Lucasart game like Xwing to load, and still then having to navigate menus to choose cryptically named sound card processors and still need manually configure mouse and joystick support on systems that typically booted straight to WIndows 3.0 - because Windows was too heavy to run games on top of it.
My point is that for a PC gamer, if the gaming experience is fun, then that is a good port, same as any other platform. He's failing to see the wood for the trees, and ignoring that the PC is a rainbow chasing device that can't have console level polishing without fixed targets like SteamDeck or SteamMachines, and even then the business model financially might still fall short.
If he's sick of the non-turnkey situation with PC - like it seems from his complaints - then maybe he should get his gaming fix on another platform, now, would be my advice. The gulf between a Snes/Megadrive experience and Windows 3.0 gaming has massively narrowed, over 2 and a bit decades while still leaving most of the benefits PC always had. Closing that gap further looks unlikely to me and maybe he should accept that is the reality for most A-AAA devs, rather than imply their ports are poor from failing to meet some unrealistic criteria for customers that are rarely covering the development costs/risk of a game, and eat really well - all things considered.
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MikeM
Member
Denton
Member
Alex haters are morons. Alex is not insulting anyone, nor "gatekeeping" or any of that nonsense.
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
What do you call AMD giving away copies of Callisto Protocol with 6000 series GPU purchases? Both Nvidia and AMD run promos with games, and it certainly ain’t for free. Then there’s Epic paying developers/publishers for timed exclusivity.
Ports still wind up shit, because developers don’t give a damn until it’s too late. Callisto Protocol’s team probably wishes they didn’t shit out the PC version now that their game bombed.
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MikeM
Member
I disagree. People don’t invest $3k+ into a PC for stuttering and crashing messes, or otherwise known as “good enough.” If those PCs can’t brute force itself past the problem, then I could only imagine the issues of people with older or mid range PCs.
As a PC owner, the whole point is to be the prettiest, highest framerate versions of what fixed platforms can offer. Broken POS games are a signal of a bigger problem with development of these titles. Devs know these games are broken and yet they still get released.
Gamers in general need to stop forking dollars over in preorders. Hold these devs accountable and wait for DF and others to provide us evidence these games aren’t broken. Then and only then should they get any money.
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
It can be hard to know what the audience expects?? I didn’t realize PC gaming just started a couple years ago.
Gaiff
SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
Unlike the mouth breathers on Gaf, many developers appreciate DF and readily invite them to their offices to give them an inside look.
A poster here actually bragged about Gaf being so shit to industry people that they all fled to Twitter or era and spoke as if this was a positive. Even the few times Nxgamer posts, he gets dogpiled and shat on.
MikeM
Member
Agree 100%. Some people here don’t realize that DF/NX Gamer and others are calling out shit performance and are a net benefit to the industry as a whole.
Maybe they wouldn’t need to exist if gamers weren’t idiots who preorder a product that has a 50/50 shot of being a buggy mess. But consumers have proven time and time again to be irrational.
JeloSWE
Member
Exactly this. I've completely stopped buying preorders. Now I put game sin my whish list and wait for DF reviews etc. Unfortunately I often have to wait over a year for games to be patched enough or get mods to run decently.
A good example is Callisto Protocol. I would likely have bought the game as I love the graphics but the reviews on it's horrible performance on release may mean I'll never buy it as other games will demand my attention and it will disappear in my back log of would be nice to play games once it have been patched enough.
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RobRSG
Member
Except that the devs doesn’t seem to know what they are doing.
PaintTinJr
Member
That's the reversal IMO, they are using the game and devaluing it to being so little it can be given away for free to improve the proposition of their niche hardware - compared to console. If the publisher was serious about marketing the game on PC as equal to console they'd be running PC specific adverts for a game in live UEFA Champions' league half time breaks like they do for games marketing on PlayStation or Xbox - games that run to tens millions for their full console marketing campaigns for a game like Calisto Protocol and hundreds of millions for games like CoD.
They probably wished they did better with the PC version, or more likely wished they didn't release on PC until after console as it directly damaged the perception of the IP on the golden goose console platform and cost them sales.
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
If they released on pc later, it would still much less because of average perception it would’ve gathered I guess
PaintTinJr
Member
These are all things that don't mitigate development risk for developers to make new quality exciting games or help them invest time in making interesting vanity game dev projects.
They would rather you bought a $500 console and spent the remaining $2,500 over the generation on games, DLC and mtx they are selling. They get less time and financial return catering to niche $3k hardware PC owners that are unfortunately low hanging fruit. None of the money for that hardware comes their way and just adds to the bigger and bigger list of hardware variations they need to test on.
The compilation issue is a side effect of the complexity and number of shaders used in games now on fixed hardware - consoles - that is the lead target platform and the one the makes or breaks a game project. To deliver games in the state Alex wants, devs are going to have to hold back the PC version release and stick with hidden loading screen systems to hide shader compilation, which seems ridiculous that PC is going to hold back console game development.
You rightfully want the "prettiest, highest framerate versions of what fixed platforms can offer." but unless something big changes on PC with maybe a dedicated low latency shader compiler engine on CPUs becoming a thing or AMD/Nvidia/Intel finding a cross vendor and driver independent solution to allow sets of shipped precompiled shaders like consoles/SteamDeck to work without pre-game or in-game compilation then that want is only going to remain true with last-gen paradigm graphics IMO. What Cerny described as the new REYES paradigm with GB/S streaming isn't going to work with the hardware specific shaders PCs need to use at the moment. This is a PC platform wide problem requiring all the hardware vendors to come together and give ground, and may even see the effective death of Opengl and DirectX for games to get a solution through Vulkan.
For games to continue to generationally leap on consoles this problem is only going to get worse on PC without a big change from all stakeholders such as MS, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and be echoed on Linux and MacOS too IMO.
PaintTinJr
Member
I don't get it, why is one developer working on a remake - rather than a new game, so presumably has time to add these items into the remastered game - indicative of wider opinion?Alex haters going to be fuming now.
Is the list Alex gave of must haves for a good PC port more important than that effort being spent on great gameplay for a game that sells on console without these needs, and gives rise to a new successful developer?
Inadvertently, I would say that tweet outs the game as being cross-gen design originally, like many games today, even if it ends up exclusive to PS5/PC. And you can't blame a dev for cosying up to Alex at DF for their games coming release on PC when the optics of the game missing Xbox could make it an easy game to criticize. They only get paid a bonus if the game does well going by the Demons' souls remake, and DF wrongly or rightly carry enough influence in the industry to help sell a game IMO,
Denton
Member
I know this may be shocking to your Hot Take Self, but many developers actually only started releasing games recently (or even haven't yet) on PC. There are also constantly new people developing PC games. And there are also plenty of things even seasoned developers simply do not put any priority towards eventhough it would be good if they did.
And there is no platform holder to set up the rules, there are only tens of millions of PC gamers with varied setups and preferences. Making PC versions is quite a bit more complex.
Most reviews were from console versions and weren't exactly glowing. The metacritic is super mediocre for such hyped game (idiotically marketed as AAAA). The stutter in PC version at launch certainly didn't help matters, but I doubt the sales would any larger without it releasing there. Even with its problems, PC version has 20K reviews, indicating some 500 000-600 000 units sold - if that estimated 2 million total number is real, this is a significant chunk of it.
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PhoenixTank
Member
Rentahamster
has said almost everything I'd want to and done it well but to add:Have been a software (not game) dev in a past life. Between sprints, scrums and other means of project management I know that it is a balancing act and devs don't get the final say over managers etc and there is never enough time. Couple that with marketing campaigns booked months and months in advance costing a hell of lot and yeah I get it. Gotta release & totally valid that some things slip through the cracks.
As a customer though I'm either going to refund a game with continual shader stuttering or hold off on purchase until it gets fixed. If the publishers want the day 1 price from me, gotta have the quality there.
I know you can't go generate the list of shaders that would be needed wayyyy before release but I would say that having the structure in place early is vital. It shouldn't be a last minute or low priority feature that can get cut by the powers that be. From the outside in all the recent problem cases I've seen it seems to have been something that was planned but missed or worse an afterthought.
The rest of the list is a bunch of nice to haves and I agree with the beyond3d chap saying that FSR2 or built upon FSR2 would be cool to have across the board as an option.
Nah, ports done by shoddy devs who are capable of doing only the bare minimum are common.
Are you one of those devs? You seem personally injured by these complaints.
Barakov
Gold Member
WELL, it's an alex video so that's one reason to be mad.
Braag
Member
Mate you should become a project manager or something in a gaming studio. You clearly have great ideas on how to maximize profit.
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You're being kind of harsh on the dev who talked about it in Beyond3d. Which game have script kiddies fixed with regard to DLSS?
If you're referring to ultrawide that's something different and a publisher will decide on whether to support it or not and unfortunately that support is based on how many customers there are with it. It's the same with phones and browsers with even the most basic games. Everything you decide to support is additional QA time. The ones that affect the least amount of people usually get the chopping block by the managers.
The fact that somebody pours their time doing it as a hobby doesn't mean the developer was an unqualified hack, it means it just wasn’t in the scope of the task they were given.
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Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Overly hyperbolic post that's trying to frame this as a "console is better than PC" issue, and all your "No true Scotsman" appeals to old school PC gaming is not going to make that true.
Fixing this issue isn't that that hard. Nvidia even made a handy Youtube guide.
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