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Modern game releases on PC are increasingly receiving poisonous optimization. FPS drops and annoying stuttering are experienced even by owners of powerful hardware. Of recent such releases, we can recall Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Redfall, which upset with their technical performance. Every time the developers come up with different excuses for poor optimization and promise to fix everything with patches. Authoritative technical experts from Digital Foundry analyzed the current situation and named the main reasons for the poor optimization of games on PC.
In their latest podcast, the editors of Digital Foundry named a huge number of reasons that led to the current state of the gaming industry. If we summarize all the information received, the technical condition of modern releases is influenced by a whole range of different factors. In many ways, consoles can be deservedly considered a source of bad optimization, but it is also influenced by the development studios themselves, who are in no hurry to adapt or fix it.
Digital Foundry employee Alex Battalia identified three key factors that directly affected the quality of the PC versions of the game. They were Unreal Engine 4, DirectX 12 and poor quality control for porting the game to PC.
According to Battalia, the Unreal Engine 4 graphics engine and its new version are very popular among developers. The problem is that modern engines are simply better optimized for consoles. For the PlayStation and Xbox, even at the early production stage, it is easy to enter the necessary data for the hardware and invest in these values. Due to the huge number of different PC configurations, it is simply impossible to do this with the “popular” platform. The transition to the notorious DirectX 12 technology brought more problems than the declared benefits. The fact is that the developers have not mastered it well and its capabilities, which is why in every new PC game there are endless compilations of shaders. On consoles, this problem is completely avoided due to non-removable configuration parameters.
Well, the last, most important problem is the developers themselves – according to Digital Foundry. As noted, modern projects simply do not receive proper control over the quality of the PC version. Some studios don’t even spend much time porting the game. This may be a banal reluctance of the developers themselves, or the root of the problem again lies in the countless options for computer configurations.
