Well to be fair it’s unreasonable to expect “everyone” to care deeply about stutters. PC gamers in particular have been conditioned to accept a lot of jank in games over many years. I’m sure for many people stutters just aren’t a big deal in the grand scheme of their total experience with a game. Either because there are bigger problems or they’re having so much fun anyway that they don’t care. That’s especially true for compilation stutters which may only occur early on and then fade from memory as you play the game.
In my recent 65 hour play through of far cry 5 there was one hard crash and 2-3 instances where the game froze for about 5 seconds and then recovered. Annoying in the moment for sure but didn’t ruin the overall experience.
So I think it’s up to outfits like DF to continue highlighting and educating on these issues because many gamers will just accept them as part of PC gaming life, keep calm and carry on.
It is indeed unreasonable to expect everyone to care deeply about stutters.. but I do expect the developers to.
And the thing about stutters is... if you aren't bothered by them.. then just shut the hell up and enjoy your game. It's when people who aren't bothered by them actively go into threads downplaying issues and try to act like they aren't there, or they put the blame on the person having the issue or their computer. It's just BS.
I repeat again.. there's no way you don't play the finished game and see these issues. The fact that developers and publishers continue to release games which have these issues means they either don't care enough to take pride in their work.. or they're simply not testing and QAing them properly. And once again before anyone says anything, I'm not blaming QA for not calling out these issues... I'm blaming whoever needs to be blamed for not fixing them.
Games can drop framerates because they're taxing.. games can have bugs.. games can crash.. But what game's should not have is constant stuttering the first time you see a character, or a magic attack, or some fucking cutscene switches camera. It's a damn joke.
I know this forum is probably getting tired of me being so negative and bringing up stuttering everywhere and I apologize. After this I'm really going to cool it down.. but this really isn't right. The industry has to do better.. and telling the people calling this stuff out that "they just don't understand how difficult of a problem it is" and so on are only making excuses. We already know exactly how SquareEnix could fix the shader compilation stuttering in Unreal Engine 4. It only requires them to play through the game thoroughly and collect the PSOs. The fact that it shader comp stutters in cutscenes on camera cuts... ridiculous. How have they not played through the game and collected those PSOs for all the cutscenes? I just don't get it.
We have the ability to pre-compile things. We're all willing to wait for this (the ones who aren't could easily have the option to skip the process).. and yet the missing link... is developers doing a good job catching all the PSOs required by their game. We have games doing a precompiling process.. but for only a small amount of PSOs. To me, it's essentially a QA issue.. not a technical one. I'm not even mad at Epic anymore about this, because really what more can we expect them to do? They've done the best they can (I think) given how DX12 and Vulkan handle pipeline state... it's on developers to do a better job now.
To me, this is the biggest issue in PC gaming. What good is fancy graphics and DLSS10 and SuperDuperFrameGenX8 1000fps when the basic fundamental of RUNNING THE CODE is precipitated by hitches which completely take you out of the experience? It's mind boggling to me that we're chasing all this future graphics tech and AI ML deeply learned whatever... when fundamental issues like this just completely ruin a persons first experience of them. Jeesh
