• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Am i the only one to be annoyed with game developers.

dmxdex2020

dmxdex2020

dmxdex2020

Soldato
Joined
16 Nov 2008
Posts
2,925
Location
West Midlands
I do hate how todays graphics cards cannot run crysis at a stable frame rate it seems very stupid that crytek should make games that todays systems cannot handle i do not bother with crysis as from all the benchmarks the ati radeon 4870x2 cannot run maxed out at a minimum framerate of 50.

Stalker clear sky is another game that comes to mind.

Is this going to be come a common thing in this day and age i sold my ps3 in favour of the pc i sometimes feel i made the wrong decision.
 
I dunno - if they include a "normal" setting that runs ok on current hardware I don't see a problem with high and ultra high settings for future hardware... stalker: cs includes support for defered shading effects that don't really run too well on todays hardware but would make the game look much nicer on future hardware and more regular settings that still look nice on todays hardware - shame the game sucks tho.
 
You definately did not make wrong decision, I've played several games on both PC and console and the PC experience is so much more amazing it cant be put into words
That being said I kinda agree that it sucks making games that dont run on full spec, but I suppose thats what drives development
 
I agree with Rroff.

However, I admit that there are exceptions. ArmA, for instance, is not very graphically impressive but runs like an absolute hog on any system with the graphics on medium settings.

Can't speak about Crysis as I've still never played it but I don't think it's as bad as people make out. Reason being it's generally regarded as the best looking game, just runs terribly. So at least they have some excuse, despite any coding errors they may have made.

At the end of the day, PCs games will never fulfill their potential unless we got onto a unified architecture (i.e. consoles). And that would kind of defeat the purpose. If that happened, I would likely switch to Apple.
 
Im pretty sure that if you play your games at 1280x720 which is the common res that consoles use that will get unscaled to a higher res making the image blurry & apply no more than 2Xaa & 8XASF at best im sure the topend PC gfx cards will hold 60fps in 99 % of titles.
 
No, infact, I love games like Crysis, it's amazing to see the cutting edge get pushed forwards, Crysis is a year old now though, we need to see a new high end game!
 
Final8y said:
Im pretty sure that if you play your games at 1280x720 which is the common res that consoles use that will get unscaled to a higher res making the image blurry & apply no more than 2Xaa & 8XASF at best im sure the topend PC gfx cards will hold 60fps in 99 % of titles.
Click to expand...

Why would you be happy with that if you could spend just £130 and get a Xbox 360.
 
Overslop said:
Why would you be happy with that if you could spend just £130 and get a Xbox 360.
Click to expand...

I was being sarcastic :)
As if the consoles where running the games at the res of 1680x1050 & 1920x1200 with the levels of AA & AFS that most play at then i think that the OP's views on a console would drastically change as to see how poorly the consoles would cope.
 
Last edited:
You're not the only one I'm sure, personally I wish games would be 64 bit ready, quad threaded, crossfire/SLI optimized, can't see it happening any time soon though.
 
The problem is that big PC games take several years to develop and, with the speed the graphics hardware is advancing, the developers have to estimate where hardware will be when the game is due for release. Sometimes they get it wrong.

I think this was one of the factors with Crysis. It was always going to push hardware to the limits but, unfortunately for them, there was a slowdown in technology in the year or so prior to its release. We've only recently seen hardware that can run it at a decent lick at high resolutions.

Bear in mind this has happened repeatedly over the years. I remember when Quake 3 first appeared and we were all turning everything off to try and get it running at a decent frame rate (i.e. 30fps) at 800x600! :)
 
theres only a few games that don't run that well on current hardware, but it does run and not maxed out they run fine, infact, pretty much maxed they are fine. a 4870x2 runs crysis maxed out, its not 50fps, but its smooth, and thats key. Its a game, that, no excuses being made runs great at 30fps. Plenty of other games, for instance for me GTA4 doesn't feel remotely smooth at 30fps, while Crysis feels great at 30fps, thats life.

Either way, its less than a handful of games and, theres a handful, if not more, games on consoles that run just as badly. GTA4, is horrible on the 360 IMHO, it frequently dips and doesn't feel smooth, it feels laggy as hell at night on the bridges, like pain in my eyes horrible. Fable 2 in mass battles gets horrific slowdown also, as do a bunch of other games. I would say, considering the resolution, lack of AA/af levels and the price required that consoles offer worse performance.

UNified architecture offers us nothing, except games that run poorly with ZERO chance to upgrade. You simply can not get a xbox 360 to run fable or gta4 at 60fps constant, in2 years you won't be able to drop in an upgrade and get it incredibly smooth. It in no way guarentee's good performance, efficient games or even good games for that matter.

Crytek/Crysis is a franchise that was always INTENDED to be pushing hardware and be even better on next gen hardware, I can list the number of companies that start off with that goal on one hand, on one finger even, yup its only them. Hardly indicitive of the games industry changing as, well the first game years ago did it, and this one and no one at all has jumped on the bandwagon at all. Its a good thing that someone is pushing boundaries hard, thats what gives us innovation and forward momentum. If games were only made for consoles we'd have a stagnant market with no pushing forwards at all till the next consoles, at which point no one would have any experience programming for better hardware and they'd not be used to using that much power so the games simply wouldn't be as advanced as they would be without the constant evolution PC's bring us.

Likewise Stalker, the first game was crap, awfully coded and a joke of buggyness, the second game got worse. It was more buggy, ran even worse and still after multiple fixes still crashes lots for lots of people. What you can call this is, a bad game developer, again its not indicitive of the market or whats to come, there are good programmers in the world, and there are bad, these guys together are bad and made a poor game with horrifically unstable code. The speed with which it runs is far far less important that the instability in this case. With Crysis with an old gfx card you can run it in lower resolution/detail settings, with Stalker, you can do the same but it will still crash like a mofo. If they can't code a remotely stable game, what makes you think they've cracked efficiency either, in which case, the same game with far better programmers might run at 150fps on a 9700 pro for all we know.
 
Last edited:
Good thing about PC is that you can tweak almost every single game to get better FPS to suit your hardware. Crysis in particular has plenty of fan made mods to increase quality & FPS. PC absolutely destroys consoles for gfx and gaming in general.

My PS3 is an expensive white elephant (cost me £600 on launch day 2007) and just sits around for months gathering dust (which it does rather well!!). Same for my X360 not bought a game for it in a year and not likely to either.

Most PS3/360 games are less than 720P then upscaled to 720P as the hardware cannot handle decent FPS so they have to take shortcuts like very low res textures, lack of decent AA & nosync so you get massive and noticeable screen tearing.

If piracy on the PC was not so bad you would see a lot more games made for it as its easier in many ways to develop for as you just pick a target hardware spec but with the consoles the fixed hardware means most of the time games have massive design compromises as not enough gfx or system ram to cope with large levels so games get broken up into many smaller disjointed mini sections and as most PC games are now multi platform designs it gets the same treatment!
 
It does feel like we've had a slew of badly coded PC games recently, not just ones that push the envelope performance wise. But it can't be easy for programmers with the various software and hardware architectures they have to code for, and that's just on the PC, stuff like different DirectX standards and multi-processing/multi-threading. It's not as simple as back in the day when performance increases were just about higher clock speeds and more memory.
 
stick by good developers imo. Valve always win my heart.

Mkaes you wonder how people like crytek manage to develop their games when no one can run the game properly after release :x
 
Daegan said:
It does feel like we've had a slew of badly coded PC games recently, not just ones that push the envelope performance wise. But it can't be easy for programmers with the various software and hardware architectures they have to code for, and that's just on the PC, stuff like different DirectX standards and multi-processing/multi-threading. It's not as simple as back in the day when performance increases were just about higher clock speeds and more memory.
Click to expand...

not really, multithreading mostly means nothing in gaming. All they've done is simply go from a single .exe with every thread packed into it, to splitting them up. Physics was always separate from AI, and graphics, and drivers, and this and that, but now there are cores theres a reason to split them up, its very very simple to do that, to actually code one of those threads to then be able to split into multiple threads, so rather than the "physics engine" just running on one core, it could spread across all cores is an entirely different matter, and one that isn't hugely necessary yet and will be incredibly difficult.

As for directx, yes you have a point dx10 is not compatible with dx9, but as most games barely use it and certain games, like GTA4 which doesn't even attempt to use it so really has no excuses for its poor performance in that regard. But many games aren't really using dx10 and would be better off rather than being able to check the dx10 feature checkbox on advertising, ignore it and have a better game.

But theres plenty of games that run in both dx9/10 just fine. Farcry 2 is a great engine, looks beautiful, runs very well on lots of hardware and runs faster in dx10, just not a very well thoughtout gameplay side of the game. It runs pretty smoothly(from what i've seen) on the ps3, and on the PC aswell.

Most of the issues we see with performance are unintended caused by bad programming(gta4/stalker) which the only real game I could mention that really runs slowly and isn't programmed badly is Crysis, but it was meant to do that, from day one they intended for the Engine to push next gen hardware, they got it working exactly as they always wanted so I'm not really sure what they got wrong. If they'd made it to run on current hardware only, the highest detail levels simply wouldn't be there at all, it wouldn't run better on current hardware, it would just run on medium at the same framerate but call that very high.

I'll never be angry or annoyed at companies for making the best engine they can physically put out with the ability their team has and use it to challenge hardware makers to catch up, its a great thing for the industry.
 
The problem with the PC is that the hardware is always getting more powerful, take a launch title on a console

Then take the sequel to said game two years later, the sequal usually looks a lot better, i remeber the differance in graphics between ridge racer 1 on the PS1 and ridge racer 3, it was like night and day, yet the hardware remained the same, the programmers just got a lot better at optimising the code and hence why ridge racer 3 had graphics more than twice as good and ran even more smoothly too

On the PC, there's no such thing optimising the code, every game is like a first gen console title, I'E one that utilises a lot less performance than the hardware is actually capable of, hence why we get a stream of PC games that seem to need really OTT hardware to play, and nothing shows this up more than console ports were to get the game running better than the console version you need a PC with twice the proccessing power of the console it originally ran on

Hence why console sequals look better because of better code, were as PC sequels rely on U spending more money on a new graphics card
 
Last edited:
If its a good developer, there will usually be patches released to increase performance after it has been shipped if that's an issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom