The most annoying thing about the cities performance issues isn’t even the performance issues. It’s all the gamers who overnight became experts in game performance that are ranting and raving online about how they obviously know how to optimize games more than professionals. It’s so tiring at this point.
Any software engineer with real professional experience can tell you performance tuning is a nightmare. It’s going through millions of lines of code checking for places you can allocate memory a bit differently. Checking collections and going back to your CS classes to make sure you’re using the best data structures. Watching performance tools and debugging for hours on end to catch that one place that slows down a bit.
People here, Reddit, and everywhere are just so tiring because they act like it’s so obvious. “Oh it’s the teeth”. “If they would have done X”. It’s honestly just so disrespectful to the full time engineers who no doubt have had those thoughts months ago. If items like this were simple, they would have done them already.
I give completely respect to the engineers who worked on this, and I respect Colossal Order’s push to still release early. As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable, I’m happy they released now.
I don’t work in games, but I do work in software and the people you describe are infuriating and have absolutely no idea what it’s like to work on a big piece of software. Thanks for the comment.
To be fair, one doesn’t have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.
(This is the first I’ve heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That’s a bit strange.)
That’s not a fair comparison. I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati, when they didn’t build a masarati. They built a van. I don’t need to go 100km/h, I needed something that could carry all of these items I have. And for me, that runs fine.
I will say that I have a new(ish) gaming rig, built about 3 years ago. I do think minimum requirements are jokingly out of date, and those needed to be upped to not mislead people. I don’t think even a 1000 series GTX card could play this on minimum settings, let alone a 900. It’s better PR just to be up front and say “Look, those cards just aren’t going to cut it. If you can’t play day one, we’re sorry, but we’re excited to see you at your next upgrade” rather than lie and say it’ll be fine.
I think it is. Note that I wrote 30km/h, not 200km/h. (In case you’re American, 30km/h is about 18mph.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (at least with low-graphics settings) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware. Yet this one fails to do so even at the lowest possible settings.
Even Baldur’s Gate 3, despite being otherwise wonderful, has some glaring hit-and-miss performance issues (think 8 fps at 1080p) that show up on hardware that can handle similar games easily. You don’t need to be a software engineer to compare it to Divinity: Original Sin 2, adjust for a few years of hardware inflation, and have a rough idea of how it should perform at moderate-to-low settings.
I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati,
I don’t doubt that those people exist, but I believe they are outliers. Most of the complaints I see about underperforming games in the past year or so are from people with very reasonable expectations. If most of the gripes you’ve seen are from teeth-blaming Masarati-entitled loudmouths, I suspect it has more to do with the forums you frequent than anything else.
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (…) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware.
You cannot directly compare PC specs with those of a console. TLoU was made by Naughty Dog who are well known for squeezing absurd amounts or performance out of console hardware. The way to do this by leveraging a platforms specific strong points. The engine is very likely designed around the strengths of the console’s hardware.
PCs have a different architecture from consoles, with different trade-offs. For example: PCs are designed to be modular. You can replace graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc. This comes at a cost. One such cost is that a PC GPU has to have it’s own discrete RAM. There is a performance penalty to this. On a console things can be much more tightly integrated. I/O on a PS5 is a good example. It’s not just a fast SSD, it’s also a storage controller with more priority levels, it’s also a storage controller that interfaces directly with the GPU cache, etc.
Sigh… You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”, and completely ignored the fact that I am talking about cases of abnormally bad performance compared to entire categories of games. The straw man you’re arguing against is not what I wrote.
I mean, you kinda do, though. You have no idea what’s going on under the hood in Divinity versus Baldur’s Gate. Even if the graphics are similar and the UI looks the same, there could well be much more complex systems involved. Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:
Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)
Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.
I haven’t reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I’ve seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven’t yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.
In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn’t have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It’s not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.
(Thankfully, the Baldur’s Gate 3 developers haven’t dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)
The most annoying thing about the cities performance issues isn’t even the performance issues. It’s all the gamers who overnight became experts in game performance that are ranting and raving online about how they obviously know how to optimize games more than professionals. It’s so tiring at this point.
Any software engineer with real professional experience can tell you performance tuning is a nightmare. It’s going through millions of lines of code checking for places you can allocate memory a bit differently. Checking collections and going back to your CS classes to make sure you’re using the best data structures. Watching performance tools and debugging for hours on end to catch that one place that slows down a bit.
People here, Reddit, and everywhere are just so tiring because they act like it’s so obvious. “Oh it’s the teeth”. “If they would have done X”. It’s honestly just so disrespectful to the full time engineers who no doubt have had those thoughts months ago. If items like this were simple, they would have done them already.
I give completely respect to the engineers who worked on this, and I respect Colossal Order’s push to still release early. As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable, I’m happy they released now.
I don’t work in games, but I do work in software and the people you describe are infuriating and have absolutely no idea what it’s like to work on a big piece of software. Thanks for the comment.
To be fair, one doesn’t have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.
(This is the first I’ve heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That’s a bit strange.)
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
That’s not a fair comparison. I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati, when they didn’t build a masarati. They built a van. I don’t need to go 100km/h, I needed something that could carry all of these items I have. And for me, that runs fine.
I will say that I have a new(ish) gaming rig, built about 3 years ago. I do think minimum requirements are jokingly out of date, and those needed to be upped to not mislead people. I don’t think even a 1000 series GTX card could play this on minimum settings, let alone a 900. It’s better PR just to be up front and say “Look, those cards just aren’t going to cut it. If you can’t play day one, we’re sorry, but we’re excited to see you at your next upgrade” rather than lie and say it’ll be fine.
I think it is. Note that I wrote 30km/h, not 200km/h. (In case you’re American, 30km/h is about 18mph.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (at least with low-graphics settings) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware. Yet this one fails to do so even at the lowest possible settings.
Even Baldur’s Gate 3, despite being otherwise wonderful, has some glaring hit-and-miss performance issues (think 8 fps at 1080p) that show up on hardware that can handle similar games easily. You don’t need to be a software engineer to compare it to Divinity: Original Sin 2, adjust for a few years of hardware inflation, and have a rough idea of how it should perform at moderate-to-low settings.
I don’t doubt that those people exist, but I believe they are outliers. Most of the complaints I see about underperforming games in the past year or so are from people with very reasonable expectations. If most of the gripes you’ve seen are from teeth-blaming Masarati-entitled loudmouths, I suspect it has more to do with the forums you frequent than anything else.
You cannot directly compare PC specs with those of a console. TLoU was made by Naughty Dog who are well known for squeezing absurd amounts or performance out of console hardware. The way to do this by leveraging a platforms specific strong points. The engine is very likely designed around the strengths of the console’s hardware.
PCs have a different architecture from consoles, with different trade-offs. For example: PCs are designed to be modular. You can replace graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc. This comes at a cost. One such cost is that a PC GPU has to have it’s own discrete RAM. There is a performance penalty to this. On a console things can be much more tightly integrated. I/O on a PS5 is a good example. It’s not just a fast SSD, it’s also a storage controller with more priority levels, it’s also a storage controller that interfaces directly with the GPU cache, etc.
Sigh… You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”, and completely ignored the fact that I am talking about cases of abnormally bad performance compared to entire categories of games. The straw man you’re arguing against is not what I wrote.
I mean, you kinda do, though. You have no idea what’s going on under the hood in Divinity versus Baldur’s Gate. Even if the graphics are similar and the UI looks the same, there could well be much more complex systems involved. Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:
Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)
Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.
I haven’t reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I’ve seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven’t yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.
In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn’t have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It’s not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.
(Thankfully, the Baldur’s Gate 3 developers haven’t dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)