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Games are less and less optimized.
Kiyoris
Member RarePosts: 2,130
Hello.
I notice that many MMO aren't actually graphically impressive, in respect to our system specs.
People now have 16GB of RAM for example.
Everquests system requirement for Depths were 256MB....megabyte...not gigabyte.
The RAM people had then was 64 TIMES lower than what we have now.
Yet EQ looked pretty decent back then, and I don't think the jump in graphics is anywhere near 64 times as high.
I notice that many MMO aren't actually graphically impressive, in respect to our system specs.
People now have 16GB of RAM for example.
Everquests system requirement for Depths were 256MB....megabyte...not gigabyte.
The RAM people had then was 64 TIMES lower than what we have now.
Yet EQ looked pretty decent back then, and I don't think the jump in graphics is anywhere near 64 times as high.
Comments
I work as technical artist in computer game company, and my job is to devise ways to implement graphic.
But every time i say : If you add this , it will seriously impact game performance - Nobody cares
Its so that the game looks good , how it runs nobody cares.
And than when comes launch date, and they figure that no PC can run that shit - than they have to remove half of graphic they made ...
Want examples ?
Witcher 3 ( the game looks 50% less good than in 3 year old presentation ), Dark Souls ( removed darkness and shadows ) , Watch Dogs .... etc
That gives you poor graphical games with high system specs.
To find an intelligent person in a PUG is not that rare, but to find a PUG made up of "all" intelligent people is one of the rarest phenomenons in the known universe.
In general though, optimization is a big problem that should be getting better, but isn't.
The Engine first of all must be optimized and the amount of codes must be reduced in order to make the game more smooth. and also effects and graphics of a game requires alot and there is most likely 1000x line of codes for each graphical item then it was back then.
your arguement is extreamly invalid.. it's obvious things requires more.
or would u say virtual reality that we get sometime will require the same? to transfer the mind of a human into a game?
[mod edit]
Its not about how many lines you write that determines performance, it's HOW you write them.
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I self identify as a monkey.
But, many games lately have been optmized really well.
GTA V is very well optimized across all platforms. Witcher 3 is optimized well for PC, but runs bad on consoles. ESO is optimized pretty well for all platforms. Battlefield and Battlefront are very well optimized on all platforms as well.
What people usually fail to realize is that all MMORPGs are very CPU heavy and when they buy new PC with 50$ CPU and 16 gigs of RAM, the crying on forums begins.
There are almost no games, that you see a huge increase with, by increasing your cpu over your graphics card, besides everquest 2, but even there you cant tell, because the only way to get a playable frame rate there is have a 10 ghz cpu.
I mean just take your cpu, and under clock it by 1000 mhz, and i guarantee you your fps isnt gonna go down all that much, under clock your gpu by 1000 mhz, and you gonna lose 20 30 fps.
So yeah, buying a 100 dollar amd 8350, and a 970 gtx, vs buying a i7 6 gen and a cheap 750 gpu, is gonna make the crying start, because the person who spend 400 bucks on a cpu, and 80 on gpu, vs the guy who spend 100 on a cpu and 400 on a gpu will be getting 10x the fps. Esp when we got people, telling others, the cpu matters a lot.
If you double the texture resolution in each dimension, that takes four times the memory right there. Want to double your draw distances? That means at least four times as much stuff has to be loaded, and possibly as high as eight, depending on how much it scales with the vertical dimension.
For computational performance, you can easily have 2/3 of the computations be just to do a few fancy lighting effects. If that's what's killing your performance, turn off those few effects and you're fine. Often if a game seems to be running poorly, it's just a matter of finding the few settings to turn off and then it runs smoothly--and those few settings don't necessarily even make the game look better.
Best answer ever.
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
Also, employee turnover, lack of focus/direction and frequent requirement changes can have a serious impact on the quality of the code. A coder may choose the optimal design for a specific set of requirements, then find out that the requirements have changed and the design is no longer optimal. Re-designing it may not be an option, so they have to make the new changes work with the current design.
So yes, computers and graphics cards and memory have all gotten bigger and better, but the same problems that existed 15 years ago still exist today.
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"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I find that games are far less buggy and laggy on PC today then they ever were. They are also often times not as much fun in many cases IMO. Sometimes I can go back and play a 2D pixel game and enjoy it more then a modern game with an amazing looking 3D world. Said old game may also be filled with bugs like Everquest was. One might argue the bugs were what created some of the funny moments in game.
I think if you want optimized games it's better to get a console or and apple device. Your are far more likely to get something optimized when the hardware is the same for everyone. That doesn't mean you will get better performance though. The faster hardware will still win in the end with regards to that.
I find a fair amount of PC games these days are actually console games. I have a PS4 myself and most new games I get on PC have the same controls as there is almost always controller support. I also see some games that would generally only be on PC like Divinity Original Sin coming out on Consoles with innovative control schemes.
I have a GTX 980 TI and if I play the WItcher 3 on Ultra it looks great, but it also pumps out a lot of hot air into my room. It's like a mini heater. My Case is huge and has good air flow. This is why the room fills up with hot air quickly. Playing the game on lower settings with reduce the heat output a bit. On the flip side the PS4 seems to get a bit hot, but it appears to dissipate most of the heat. The room doesn't appear to get hot when playing games like the Witcher 3. I feel that there is a limit on how far the hardware can go and to much time ends up getting spend on things like graphics and physics instead of making a fun game to play.
I guess my point is that if the game is fun to play that is what really matters. I find the fun isn't generally from great graphics or smooth gameplay always. A lot of the time it is something more intangible and personal.
GW1 is easily the best I've seen. Looks sweet, runs on a toaster (slang for PC that makes more heat than processing power).
Most players can and do run multiple things while gaming. People almost expect to be able to alt-tab and listen to youtube or watch a quick tutorial.
It's not all graphics models. It's shadows, it's smoother movement, it's particle effects, it's being able to watch a cutscene and render in the background (loading screens). It's more players on the screen, it's better physics. It's nicer looking abilities and proper overlap/transition between animations. For some games, it's the ability of trajectory to determine the target rather than target determining the trajectory.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
When your Graphics Hardware is more than a decade behind the rest of the Hardware you don't need to wonder why there is no "optimization". I fact the basic architecture has not changed since 1998.
This will hopefully change with DX12 and a new Generation of GPUs that finally support 64Bit.
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- Michael Bitton
Community Manager, MMORPG.com
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Next, GPUs can do 64-bit computations; it's merely much slower than 32-bit computations. For example, 64-bit floating point computations are supported in OpenGL 4.0 or later; 64-bit integer and floating point computations are supported in any version of OpenCL at all. If games wanted to use 64-bit computations, they could; they generally don't because there's not much advantage to doing so.
Graphics is very heavily focused on 32-bit floating point computations. In some places, even 16-bit floating point arithmetic would be plenty. The extra precision of 64-bit computations would be mildly nice to avoid rounding errors in some places when doing geometry computations, mainly to allow one thing to cover another while being very close to it. For color computations, 64-bit arithmetic has no advantage over 32-bit at all.
Furthermore, GPU architectures have changed radically since 1998. 1998 itself brought the first GPUs with multiple shaders on a single GPU; today's GPUs have thousands of them. We got programmable shaders in 2001; before that, GPUs were fixed-function architectures, and programming them really just meant giving them different data. Then we got unified shaders in 2006, which makes possible GPU compute other than for graphics; more immediately, it allowed geometry shaders in graphics. Greatly increasing use of SIMD scheduling over the course of a number of years made massive increases in compute capabilities possible. Then we got tessellation in 2009. Since then, we've had all sorts of little architectural changes to make GPU programming far more versatile, such as increasing register file sizes or the proliferation of high-throughput GDDR5 memory and more recently HBM.
Then we have the next phsse of the problem,we are not even seeing quality games,NOT ONE,every single one of these games is doing a little something here or there byut none of them are an overall complete package with depth in systems,graphics,animations,UI,AI,effects,textures etc etc.I can only imagine how long it will take before i see a really good triple A quality BUILT game and what kind of system i will need to run it.
It doesn't end there,you have to do some optimizing of every single section/zoned off part of a map,weather it is a physically seen zone line or not.There is no way these devs who are already going cheap on their design efforts are going to put a lot more work into optimization.
What i am actually seeing are devs are moving closer to automating everything,from game mechanics to map builds even the optimizing.We are NOT witnessing passionate game designs but merely business products,do as little as possible to sell the product and hope for LUCK.The whole gaming market got it easy when people started accepting VERY cheap game builds like browser games and Moba's,even HS a simple card game was done rather cheap by Blizzard whom we all know for FACT could have done a million times better job with it.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Back in the 70s/80s, a guy named Daniel Lawrence used to go to conventions and demo his game Telengard. It was one of the very first crpgs and it had 50 levels of dungeon (think of 50 floors) with millions of rooms. It originally ran on a computer with only 8k ram. There was no room for maps so he created procedurally generated maps.
I am sure some companies are interested in optimization but not certain all of them put top priority on it. It should be something all companies look at to some degree.
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https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Meanwhile, a game can easily have tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code that run so rarely that even if you could make it all run ten times as fast, no one would ever notice outside of synthetic timings. So "optimizing" that code is not about performance, but about debugging and documenting it. In some cases, games will even use scripting languages for a bunch of code that are slower than a compiled language by an order of magnitude or so--but only for the portions of code that run rarely and so performance doesn't matter.
They don't want to hear the math. They just want their magical thinking to work.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"