Maybe the pandemic had a noticeable impact on game development the past 3 years.
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
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To be clear, this is not a bad PC port. This is a badly coded game full stop. I just watched Alex's video back to back with Johns Xbox analysis and all of the issues that plague the PC version impact the Series X as well. Which is locked at 30fps.
Just to add a bit of context... it is a bad coded game on Series too.
The bad is not exclusive to PC.
Lol at the texture loading times. Wtf is that. My current strategy of waiting 7-8 years before playing a game really seems to be paying off
I'll take a stab at what I think may be going on..
The Pandemic caused a lot of issues for games developed during that timeframe, but more important are the effects it has had on multiple other major industries alongside video game development. It's no secret that when the pandemic was in full swing there was a fundamental shift in not only the way people worked, but how they viewed work. Working from home, or shall I say remotely, was suddenly a necessity and many companies not only worked through the change, but some also thrived from it. Many devs simply decided that they would never go back to how it was before after that point.
So during this time, people were connected through their devices more than ever, and we started to see a major push for the "Metaverse" by some of the biggest companies in the world. The battle/search for talent had drastically risen, and not only did these companies want many people they also wanted top people, and had no problem paying top dollar for them. And thus I believe the video game industry was ripe for the picking... and many of the better developers out there realized that the grass was way greener on the other side and took advantage. Others may stay in gaming, but do indie or passion projects which allow them freedoms to try new things that they don't get at the bigger studios.
Now, there's also a huge push for AI... which has the attention of all the top minds in technology right now.. so all the same things apply there. All of this new and exciting stuff is likely draining a lot of the top talent away from developing video games. And then of course you have engines like Unreal which allow artists to build and create incredible things.. but perhaps not in the most performant manner possible.
So we've had major API changes, engines like UE which are more artist driven, game complexity going up as well at the same time... they all play a part.
Great video. The CPU scalability tests really drove the point home. Would definitely vote for including those in every review. The shadow pop-in and texture issues are unbelievable. There’s no way Arkane didn’t know about those before shipping.
I really enjoyed the comment under the video about this year being Alex’s villain origin story. Lol.
Very thorough. Type of thing I wish NxG did more of, if you make a claim you should be able to test it and prove it, extra points for showing where else it fails (Jedi survivor) and where it succeeds (cyberpunk).
Great video
Man from Atlantis
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I might be mistaken but didn't Alex say you can brute force it to 60fps on a high end CPU like his 12900k, but you'd still get drops from the traversal stutters?
If so that's essentially the same (but doubke) as the XSX 30fps which also stutters below.
My point is the 30 fps limit is rather consequence of game overall terrible state rather than xss holding it down.
D
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What are you talking about? The port perfectly matches the technically state of the Xbox Series game!
I really dont think it's 'lack of talent'. Trying to paint developers as incompetent(or worse, lazy) always feels like one of the most reactionary takes gamers make when it comes to assessing game issues. Especially when the issues are so widespread, it points to a more systemic explanation leading to these problems across so many games.
To start, games releasing with more and more issues is a trend we've had going well before the pandemic came along. It's true that since, things have taken a more drastic turn for the worse, but I think blaming the pandemic is just a faulty case of mistaking correlation by trying to isolate 'what's changed' and then finding one thing and blaming it all on that.
For me, I see a more clear correlation between 'increasing complexity and ambition' and 'increasing issues'. And I think it's no surprise that as we take the leap to true next gen titles that we've seen a leap in problems with it. For PC specifically, low level API's are now basically mandatory for any AAA games, and devs are being asked to do ever more with them when it already was very difficult to do even with less cutting edge games. And we've got a whole paradigm shift in how memory management needs to work since new consoles only came with a small increase in RAM, and of course PC is fairly late to the party in supporting DirectStorage.
I dont think studios three years ago(pre-pandemic) would have magically been so much better at all this and we'd have all these wonderfully optimized games now with few issues. Even Naughty Dog, who are famed for their top level talent and resources, released a disaster PC port of their own game. Game development in the modern era has always been very challenging and only gotten moreso with time. And I think what devs are being asked to do right now is deal with a mess of troubles. I do think there will be things that will get better, but at the same time, ambitions are only going to go up. Gonna be a hard balancing act.
To start, games releasing with more and more issues is a trend we've had going well before the pandemic came along. It's true that since, things have taken a more drastic turn for the worse, but I think blaming the pandemic is just a faulty case of mistaking correlation by trying to isolate 'what's changed' and then finding one thing and blaming it all on that.
For me, I see a more clear correlation between 'increasing complexity and ambition' and 'increasing issues'. And I think it's no surprise that as we take the leap to true next gen titles that we've seen a leap in problems with it. For PC specifically, low level API's are now basically mandatory for any AAA games, and devs are being asked to do ever more with them when it already was very difficult to do even with less cutting edge games. And we've got a whole paradigm shift in how memory management needs to work since new consoles only came with a small increase in RAM, and of course PC is fairly late to the party in supporting DirectStorage.
I dont think studios three years ago(pre-pandemic) would have magically been so much better at all this and we'd have all these wonderfully optimized games now with few issues. Even Naughty Dog, who are famed for their top level talent and resources, released a disaster PC port of their own game. Game development in the modern era has always been very challenging and only gotten moreso with time. And I think what devs are being asked to do right now is deal with a mess of troubles. I do think there will be things that will get better, but at the same time, ambitions are only going to go up. Gonna be a hard balancing act.
How much of it is publishers pushing the game out before its ready I wonder
The Jedi Survivor trace simply proves otherwise.
You're right though... it is a systemic issue... one of publishers releasing games before they're ready.
You intend to render off a single thread forever ? The alternative is GPU based rendering which I don’t think DX11 supports.
The number of unique objects on screen has definitely gone up. The detail of each object is also up. And volumetrics are higher resolution. None of this explains the terrible performance on new apis and new hardware that should easily handle those things though.
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