What the hell is going on with pc game ports?
video description
It didn t take long for video cards in PC to overtake the architecture in the 360 in any case as I believe it was within a year at the most.
Unfortunately most games are developed on PS5 and just ported to Xbox and PC without taking into account changes needed for Dx12 in particular.
Many features on PS5 running in hardware are forced to only run In software on Series X and S due to lack of optimisation.
This includes texture compression where Kraken will work on both consoles but is software only on Xbox.
The devs refusal to use Xbox s version is why we see so much performance issues on series X over PS5 in multi plat. (Hence why we are seeing texture pop on both Series X/S as they are only using the CPU to decompress textures instead of GPU.
PC games are relatively able to be brute forced in most cases too which is just laziness on the publishers behalf to not optimise them before release.
Unless Microsoft do a massive push with devs to properly incorporate DX 12 feature sets correctly we will continue to see all of these issues on both Xbox and PC.
Date: 2023-03-12
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Comments and reviews: 14
Barebare
PC gaming nowadays is a gamble, you're one game away from feeling inadequate in your setup and being forced to tampering tinkering with the game config files and settings so much you wonder if its even worth the money and time at all by the time you solved all the problems that are avoidable and shouldn't be there in the first place.
Went back to PC gaming after 17 years, bought myself a high end gaming model and saw that not only things barely changed it actually got worse that sinking feeling that something nasty will happen while I play, I don't have to worry about the latest game not launching at all on my console for example and that's just the start for all kinds of what if its always on the back of my head every time I launch a game on PC hoping that it will be a smooth experience each time, it wasn't to be.
Seeing console version pulling well ahead in overall experience and consistency over my high end gaming Laptop is very humbling.
PC biggest strength are also its biggest weakness, its sheer amount of hardware configurations.
Very difficult to get a consistent experience out of your game when there are millions different hardware setup out there with other wildly different combination of conflicting installed software push and pull your resources and attention away from gaming.
Then you have greedy publishers execs pushing impossible goals and tick boxes into the hands of developers forced them to released game that are clearly not polished or worse buggy unfinished mess with myriad obstacles and monetization mechanics to make your game felt like a chore and a hell to play then on top of that these devs have to make them works on many different PC hardware and that's the least of their worries the result is we get unpolished releases on PCs that normalized We'll fix it later mentality and worse this extends into consoles so we all suffer but back in days it was almost exclusively a PC problem.
Sadly it will never be solved not when the hardware manufacturers releasing their latest greatest every 6 months and tell us everything will run like a dream, it doesn't.
Dev focused on consoles because they're the only platform they can really optimizing their games due to their relatively fixed hardware.
Optimizing for PC are like living in Wild West they only can make them games temporarily optimized until there's a new sheriff or bandits in hardware town.
reply
PC gaming nowadays is a gamble, you're one game away from feeling inadequate in your setup and being forced to tampering tinkering with the game config files and settings so much you wonder if its even worth the money and time at all by the time you solved all the problems that are avoidable and shouldn't be there in the first place.
Went back to PC gaming after 17 years, bought myself a high end gaming model and saw that not only things barely changed it actually got worse that sinking feeling that something nasty will happen while I play, I don't have to worry about the latest game not launching at all on my console for example and that's just the start for all kinds of what if its always on the back of my head every time I launch a game on PC hoping that it will be a smooth experience each time, it wasn't to be.
Seeing console version pulling well ahead in overall experience and consistency over my high end gaming Laptop is very humbling.
PC biggest strength are also its biggest weakness, its sheer amount of hardware configurations.
Very difficult to get a consistent experience out of your game when there are millions different hardware setup out there with other wildly different combination of conflicting installed software push and pull your resources and attention away from gaming.
Then you have greedy publishers execs pushing impossible goals and tick boxes into the hands of developers forced them to released game that are clearly not polished or worse buggy unfinished mess with myriad obstacles and monetization mechanics to make your game felt like a chore and a hell to play then on top of that these devs have to make them works on many different PC hardware and that's the least of their worries the result is we get unpolished releases on PCs that normalized We'll fix it later mentality and worse this extends into consoles so we all suffer but back in days it was almost exclusively a PC problem.
Sadly it will never be solved not when the hardware manufacturers releasing their latest greatest every 6 months and tell us everything will run like a dream, it doesn't.
Dev focused on consoles because they're the only platform they can really optimizing their games due to their relatively fixed hardware.
Optimizing for PC are like living in Wild West they only can make them games temporarily optimized until there's a new sheriff or bandits in hardware town.
reply
Beware
I prefer console gaming because there's nothing to configure except for a few settings and rarely do I even touch those. No need to worry about upgrading graphic cards and fighting to ensure everything is compatible. It's very simple.
I also work a traditional 8 to 5 job and am on the computer all day for that. I don't want computers to be both what I work on and where I spend the vast amount of my leisure time as well. I'll end up living in my office. Not to mention, my eyes often hurt by the end of the day and I yearn to look at some other type of screen. Usually, that's my phone, but I like knowing I can sit in my living room and play my console on a TV if I want to, I don't need to return to the office/my place of work to play a game. I shut the door to that room when I exit to make it clear that that is a work room, for the most part. Me going through probably my first real bout od depression during the pandemic made me realize the importance of having separate rooms for my tasks, back when I used to work from my bedroom and didn't have the space for an office.
Oh, amd lastly, I'm also just a casual gamer. Motion sickness has made it so I can't play a game for longer than an hour or so, and then I get a headache and feel sick. I wouldn't want to spent thousands of dollars on a PC just to barely touch it.
reply
I prefer console gaming because there's nothing to configure except for a few settings and rarely do I even touch those. No need to worry about upgrading graphic cards and fighting to ensure everything is compatible. It's very simple.
I also work a traditional 8 to 5 job and am on the computer all day for that. I don't want computers to be both what I work on and where I spend the vast amount of my leisure time as well. I'll end up living in my office. Not to mention, my eyes often hurt by the end of the day and I yearn to look at some other type of screen. Usually, that's my phone, but I like knowing I can sit in my living room and play my console on a TV if I want to, I don't need to return to the office/my place of work to play a game. I shut the door to that room when I exit to make it clear that that is a work room, for the most part. Me going through probably my first real bout od depression during the pandemic made me realize the importance of having separate rooms for my tasks, back when I used to work from my bedroom and didn't have the space for an office.
Oh, amd lastly, I'm also just a casual gamer. Motion sickness has made it so I can't play a game for longer than an hour or so, and then I get a headache and feel sick. I wouldn't want to spent thousands of dollars on a PC just to barely touch it.
reply
bluedemon82384
Got to agree, for me it comes down to stop announcing video games so early, that adds additional pressure to the Dev teams to get the game out faster, companies should wait to announce games until they are well past alpha stage or even into a beta build. And then tell shareholders to shut the hell up about making a release date if the game is buggy and needs more polish time. I understand that this is a bit of contradiction but I feel that gamers wouldn't have the massive wait times if they waited to announce a new game and if it delayed they would know that once released it would be completed game. Fable is a perfect example, announced last year, by all reports/rumors that game is years off for completion, but fans and shareholders will continue to ask, pressure and in general be a pain in the ass until it releases, and could very well pressure that game to release too early, thus releasing incomplete and killing the series once and for all. Let devs do the work and let the world know about it when it's much closer to being a finished product.
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Got to agree, for me it comes down to stop announcing video games so early, that adds additional pressure to the Dev teams to get the game out faster, companies should wait to announce games until they are well past alpha stage or even into a beta build. And then tell shareholders to shut the hell up about making a release date if the game is buggy and needs more polish time. I understand that this is a bit of contradiction but I feel that gamers wouldn't have the massive wait times if they waited to announce a new game and if it delayed they would know that once released it would be completed game. Fable is a perfect example, announced last year, by all reports/rumors that game is years off for completion, but fans and shareholders will continue to ask, pressure and in general be a pain in the ass until it releases, and could very well pressure that game to release too early, thus releasing incomplete and killing the series once and for all. Let devs do the work and let the world know about it when it's much closer to being a finished product.
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fanjoy
There are gaps in your argument, but thats okay atleast you are in the right ball park.
PS: x86 is just the architecture of the intel 8086 architecture which was out in 1986.
Now a days we have consoles running amd 64 architecture. And to emulate the amd64 architecture on x86 architecture is a nightmare but intel made a x86 chip compatible 64 bit chip which can emulate older architecture but gets slow because to ramdisk management for both chips.
Now the challenge comes in virtualisation with persistent storage.
Consoles get around this challenge easily in terms of running older games.
In conclusion, as the chip designs continue to get closer and closer, the assembly code gets easier for RISC based chips.
Intel has the CISC architecture chips and would becomes obsolete in the times to come.
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There are gaps in your argument, but thats okay atleast you are in the right ball park.
PS: x86 is just the architecture of the intel 8086 architecture which was out in 1986.
Now a days we have consoles running amd 64 architecture. And to emulate the amd64 architecture on x86 architecture is a nightmare but intel made a x86 chip compatible 64 bit chip which can emulate older architecture but gets slow because to ramdisk management for both chips.
Now the challenge comes in virtualisation with persistent storage.
Consoles get around this challenge easily in terms of running older games.
In conclusion, as the chip designs continue to get closer and closer, the assembly code gets easier for RISC based chips.
Intel has the CISC architecture chips and would becomes obsolete in the times to come.
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Ariel
I feel like it's corporate greed & lack of new game engines being used. You know how many developers are forced to use in house game engines that are 7+ years old? When I startedd messing around with Unreal Engine 5. 0. 3 I realized how quickly you can make games that look, run & function GREAT on all platforms. The truth is that corporate greed doesn't allow their developers to use an engine made by Epic Games Studios because they want payment after 3, 000 is made. Big whoop. Games make billions of dollars & developers make less than 150, 000 after years of developing experience. This is why a lot of developers are branching out, building smaller teams & making their own games. We have the technology now to make AAA games from home without ever having a full-fledged studio & big budgets or large teams.
reply
I feel like it's corporate greed & lack of new game engines being used. You know how many developers are forced to use in house game engines that are 7+ years old? When I startedd messing around with Unreal Engine 5. 0. 3 I realized how quickly you can make games that look, run & function GREAT on all platforms. The truth is that corporate greed doesn't allow their developers to use an engine made by Epic Games Studios because they want payment after 3, 000 is made. Big whoop. Games make billions of dollars & developers make less than 150, 000 after years of developing experience. This is why a lot of developers are branching out, building smaller teams & making their own games. We have the technology now to make AAA games from home without ever having a full-fledged studio & big budgets or large teams.
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kajerhoo
I seriously feel like one of the biggest issues with all of this is that no matter how completely screwed up a PC port is there are ALWAYS people coming out saying there are NO problems on their PC. which, there are, they just don't notice them for whatever reasons.
I mean you name dropped Alex Battaglia in this video, you'll find under every DF video he makes multiple people claiming they see no problems even after watching him thoroughly illustrating the specific issues on multiple sets of hardware from different vendors.
You also had to mention Pokemon. After Scarlet and Violet sold 10 million + copies almost instantly upon release, more than anything it proved you don't need to make your title anything more than barely functional to make sales if you have the right IP.
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I seriously feel like one of the biggest issues with all of this is that no matter how completely screwed up a PC port is there are ALWAYS people coming out saying there are NO problems on their PC. which, there are, they just don't notice them for whatever reasons.
I mean you name dropped Alex Battaglia in this video, you'll find under every DF video he makes multiple people claiming they see no problems even after watching him thoroughly illustrating the specific issues on multiple sets of hardware from different vendors.
You also had to mention Pokemon. After Scarlet and Violet sold 10 million + copies almost instantly upon release, more than anything it proved you don't need to make your title anything more than barely functional to make sales if you have the right IP.
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Jennifer
Do they wanna sell or don't they? I play on a gaming laptop. Alot of people like me Falcon and I don't mind playing older games. NOT getting a Playstation because I don't need another gizmo which does only one thing at that. And confines you to just one room. Now for those hardened games this might be a big deal but I could wake up tomorrow and decide gaming is not my thing anymore OR I need a really long break, Besides I have a Steam Deck anyway. I know this may sound like heresy but seriously I don't give a damn about Sony, Warner Brothers etc etc etc. I see a game and I get it. Most times it works out well, sometimes I get a lemon like God of War. geez what the heck did you see in that game.
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Do they wanna sell or don't they? I play on a gaming laptop. Alot of people like me Falcon and I don't mind playing older games. NOT getting a Playstation because I don't need another gizmo which does only one thing at that. And confines you to just one room. Now for those hardened games this might be a big deal but I could wake up tomorrow and decide gaming is not my thing anymore OR I need a really long break, Besides I have a Steam Deck anyway. I know this may sound like heresy but seriously I don't give a damn about Sony, Warner Brothers etc etc etc. I see a game and I get it. Most times it works out well, sometimes I get a lemon like God of War. geez what the heck did you see in that game.
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Mark
I think Falcon has forgotten the elephant in the room concerning PC gaming. For several years, it has been nearly impossible for a PC gamer to get a good graphics card because they were snatched up by the cyber currency miners. Now, the cards are available again, but the newest cards such as the Nvidia 4xxx series which is highly desired is also seriously overpriced. I upgraded from a i7-4790K that was eight years old to a i9-13900K last Christmas, but I'm still using a 1080 video card that was purchased at the end of the 1xxx product cycle. Hopefully prices will drop in the spring. There was also the RAM price spike in 2017 where the price of memory doubled.
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I think Falcon has forgotten the elephant in the room concerning PC gaming. For several years, it has been nearly impossible for a PC gamer to get a good graphics card because they were snatched up by the cyber currency miners. Now, the cards are available again, but the newest cards such as the Nvidia 4xxx series which is highly desired is also seriously overpriced. I upgraded from a i7-4790K that was eight years old to a i9-13900K last Christmas, but I'm still using a 1080 video card that was purchased at the end of the 1xxx product cycle. Hopefully prices will drop in the spring. There was also the RAM price spike in 2017 where the price of memory doubled.
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FooBar
My biggest gripe with games these days is the PC versions that come out with garbage console control schemes. Key mappings that can't be rebound to keys that make sense, janky-ass controls that don't actually work like using a mouse is supposed to work, and camera angles that you can't change and don't make sense.
I've attempted to play a couple AAA games that have come out in the recent past and just plain given up on them because the ports were so bad. it's gotten to the point where I just plain will not buy a game till it's been out awhile and I can look at a number of reviews to see how bad the controls and/or camera are on the PC version.
reply
My biggest gripe with games these days is the PC versions that come out with garbage console control schemes. Key mappings that can't be rebound to keys that make sense, janky-ass controls that don't actually work like using a mouse is supposed to work, and camera angles that you can't change and don't make sense.
I've attempted to play a couple AAA games that have come out in the recent past and just plain given up on them because the ports were so bad. it's gotten to the point where I just plain will not buy a game till it's been out awhile and I can look at a number of reviews to see how bad the controls and/or camera are on the PC version.
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Lethalis
So many issues aren't event hardware based. There seems to be no excuse for controller based UI on PC. Why can't I rebind keys? Why can't I click menu tabs instead of pressing Z and X to move through them.
Performance based issues can be ironed out and understood as they can't find every bug. But with games like Wo Long basically requiring a controller to navigate, regardless of good performance, excuses begin to wane.
Great video, and a good overview of why some things are going the way they are. Gameranx putting out quality content back to back to back.
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So many issues aren't event hardware based. There seems to be no excuse for controller based UI on PC. Why can't I rebind keys? Why can't I click menu tabs instead of pressing Z and X to move through them.
Performance based issues can be ironed out and understood as they can't find every bug. But with games like Wo Long basically requiring a controller to navigate, regardless of good performance, excuses begin to wane.
Great video, and a good overview of why some things are going the way they are. Gameranx putting out quality content back to back to back.
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Jenny
LOL at showing Macs and an Amiga in this vid.
You're exactly right that Xbox and PS hardware are the same across the board. PCs have too many variables to deal with. Personally, I haven't had a lot of issues with current games except for AC Valhalla. Not sure why that game kept crashing during raids. Hogwarts Legacy ran great on ultra. I did turn off the upscaling as I'm using a 1080p monitor. My current and previous gaming computers were built by me so I assuming I don't have the bloatware that comes from pre-made PCs you buy at BestBuy or elsewhere.
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LOL at showing Macs and an Amiga in this vid.
You're exactly right that Xbox and PS hardware are the same across the board. PCs have too many variables to deal with. Personally, I haven't had a lot of issues with current games except for AC Valhalla. Not sure why that game kept crashing during raids. Hogwarts Legacy ran great on ultra. I did turn off the upscaling as I'm using a 1080p monitor. My current and previous gaming computers were built by me so I assuming I don't have the bloatware that comes from pre-made PCs you buy at BestBuy or elsewhere.
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Sapphire
It's not just memory. OS and Kernels have different system calls that have to be accounted for. APIs are different between platforms which can lead to huge amounts of refactoring. You have to rely heavily on console manufacturers having good documentation on their devkits and if you're using Game Engine you have to hope they implement their features well or you're going to be doing it yourself anyway. Not even Unreal Engine works well across all platforms - it's Vulkan renderer has been notoriously bad for years.
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It's not just memory. OS and Kernels have different system calls that have to be accounted for. APIs are different between platforms which can lead to huge amounts of refactoring. You have to rely heavily on console manufacturers having good documentation on their devkits and if you're using Game Engine you have to hope they implement their features well or you're going to be doing it yourself anyway. Not even Unreal Engine works well across all platforms - it's Vulkan renderer has been notoriously bad for years.
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Sevrin
You can see this in the development of the Elder Scrolls games at Bethesda, up to the release of Morrowind they were exclusively developed on the PC, and then last minute they got the opportunity to release Morrwind as a launch title for the brand new Xbox. Then from Oblivion onwards they have developed for the Xbox and designed the games around that, which is why they've dumbed down the games to the point they're no longer RPGs, but Action games with RPG elements, and the menu systems have been utter trash.
reply
You can see this in the development of the Elder Scrolls games at Bethesda, up to the release of Morrowind they were exclusively developed on the PC, and then last minute they got the opportunity to release Morrwind as a launch title for the brand new Xbox. Then from Oblivion onwards they have developed for the Xbox and designed the games around that, which is why they've dumbed down the games to the point they're no longer RPGs, but Action games with RPG elements, and the menu systems have been utter trash.
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Shillong
As a kid id probably want only a console. but as an adult i think consoles have no real future. I mean unless you are impatient and wanna play the latest games. But as you grow older the pc makes more sense. And as for games theres always piracy to lighten up the wallet. Plus when it comes to gaming with kids coming up i no longer can play 4-5 hrs straight its always work in between so pc solves that. Plus in my opinion a ryzen 3 or 5 with vega graphics is way cheaper whan a console.
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As a kid id probably want only a console. but as an adult i think consoles have no real future. I mean unless you are impatient and wanna play the latest games. But as you grow older the pc makes more sense. And as for games theres always piracy to lighten up the wallet. Plus when it comes to gaming with kids coming up i no longer can play 4-5 hrs straight its always work in between so pc solves that. Plus in my opinion a ryzen 3 or 5 with vega graphics is way cheaper whan a console.
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