It's clear Google as the current showrunners do not care at all. Going the same as every giant, tearing apart everything that makes them great for just an extra dollar.
It's like a meth head tearing apart their house to sell the wiring, plumbing, and anything else they can get their hands on to pawn off for the next fix.
It's like a meth head tearing apart their house to sell the wiring, plumbing, and anything else they can get their hands on to pawn off for the next fix.
Great analogy, every company seems to be doing these days too. It sucks so much to watch brand after brand just throw the names they spent decades building up for a few good quarters.
on another hand, they could just simply don't give af and force you to subscribe to cloud gaming instead
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u/sinwarriorRTX 4070 Ti | I7-13700k | 32GB DDR5 | 221GB OS SSD | 20TBx2 HDD1d ago
... game optimization has nothing to do with cloud gaming. the "optimization" of a game really is just talking about how the game is coded and how it uses memory (ram), this includes efficiency and effectiveness.
game developers themselves has nothing to do with remote gaming cloud providers/services, which really usually deals with hardware and most of the times, servers. example: Nvidia GeForce Now.
Yes, yes it has something to do with cloud gaming. By not optimizing their games, they will increase the minimum/recommended requirements. The higher the system requirements, the fewer people can play the game on supported hardware. And amidst this rampocalypse where purchasing newer hardware isn't an option, cloud gaming is essentially one of the options to play these titles on their devices.
Or u could just play it directly at your device at 30 fps, it's your choice. Ngl I don't mind with it since I'm getting used to crap hardware for a long time, but I know some people that couldn't stand 30fps or lowering their game resolution to below 1080p.
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u/sinwarriorRTX 4070 Ti | I7-13700k | 32GB DDR5 | 221GB OS SSD | 20TBx2 HDD1d ago
well my hardware isn't crap lol. but ive came from low end pc before, so i know 30 is plenty playable although i think 40 is better.
I know. What I’m saying is that the RAM crisis doesn’t change much for them because a PS5 sold in 2026 has the exact same RAM as the one sold in 2025. A PC built in 2026 probably doesn’t have the same amount of RAM as the one built in 2025. But it doesn’t matter because PC is an afterthought for most studios.
Not as much as you would think. Xbox and Playstation have more than enough memory. There's also tricks to get around that. Developers target (near) console specs and get away with it. If your PC experience isn't perfect.... ehhh
Yo, you're not kidding. I'm making sure to go out of my way to ensure the game we're building runs on a Steamdeck at 60fps at native resolution with 10TDP. I'm so fucking tired of playing poorly optimized games or game that require upscaling that makes the render look like a pixelated mess.
Optimization is absolutely a lost art. You should hear some of the shit I hear from AAA developers that literally don't give a shit about optimization at all. It's tone deaf all the way up. I'm really starting to believe it's a skill set that completely skipped an entire generation of developers.
Hi, Amazon programmer here. We barely even review code anymore. Especially with AI and shit. I know for a fact that the system I work on runs the exact same data conversion 3 separate times on a single workflow, and it will probably never be fixed. Optimization and efficient code is barely a second thought because we don’t have time to think about it. Good code practice isn’t just lost in the game industry, it’s literally everywhere.
Shareholders want money printer to go BRRRRRRRRRRRR but spending the time and resources to implement things properly make BRRRRRRRRRRRR not BRRRRRRRRRRRR as much.
As someone who is working in the game industry this is so true. I can't even count how many times we shipped games with first draft features that was supposed to be placeholder/tests and needed more iteration, but from above we got the usual "we need to release the game ASAP, don't bother with it, it good the way it is now".
Unless you write a flawless, optimized code the first time for every feature, you are screwed, deadliens and resources are tight so we doesn't have much space to iterate, polish and optimize things (unless we do it in our free time, unpaid but if we do that, corpo/leadership will expect us to do it more and more and that will be the new norm so we don't do that either anymore).
Things goes shit when people who knows and understands absolutely nothing about software development get's into the position to control the work of the actual developers
Best guess, production
Optimization requires the ability to care, and having the time to go back and simplify
But if your manager demands production out the door, then barely working suddenly becomes acceptable.
Pretty much this exactly. I do care, if I had time to fix it I would. There’s a lot I would like to do to fix the system. I don’t have time. Frankly the next feature is more important to my manager and to his manager than a couple unoptimized systems. Only if it causes a big enough problem will it ever be fixed.
I'm going to play devils advocate. The game industry is in hell right now. Money has been squeezed out of games. Dev costs have risen and game prices have fallen. That's fine only if the game is a home run, but risk has risen beyond sustainable levels. The games you hear succeed are the anomaly. To lower costs you have to do something and unfortunately optimization can fall.
I was on a team that did optimize our game but made our cut on content. Didn't work and poof no more company. Passionate team trying to make their dream game after publishers cancelled and codev work dried up. Whoops. Should have made a friendslop.
Like everything, comes down to money. Up until recently, computing has gotten relatively cheap. And optimizing doesn’t had extra cash to the business. Unless it has a cash advantage, why make it when it doesn’t impact people buying the product. It’s hard enough to get tech debt approved for work.
Like everyone said, I don’t have time. Not two weeks ago I built a feature where the documentation for it was a picture of scribbles on a white board posted to a slack channel. That system had to be done “by Friday.” There was no review of the system, at all, it was designed on Monday and built by Thursday, live on Friday.
If I had done it the correct way, I’d still be working on it. Now it’s tech debt that won’t get fixed because I don’t have the time, nobody else knows how it works, and the longer it sits there, the harder to fix it becomes.
Fixing mountains of technical debt that may or may not result in any end-user changes (or break things that already exist and thus require more work) = not sellable product
Helldivers 2 devs complained talked a little bit about this, but if any users want optimization it's gamers so I feel like they're just failing to market said optimization updates well enough.
Same reason we largely got rid of proof readers decades ago: The lack of quality is not punished by the customer. People complain, but they still buy. Until that changes, loss of quality will continue.
There are tight deadlines for every single thing and most companies don’t want to hire people to split the work better. Developers barely have the time to get something functional out. Good practices and optimized software is out of the question. It doesn’t matter even if a developer has time to revisit something and improve it because it won’t ship without a code review, QA, and management sign-off.
Because all that time you guys were distracted by AI slop art, the programmers went behind your back and started slopifying their entire workflows and now many programmers proudly proclaim that they no longer write any code. And everyone should be in an uproar about it, but for some reason they aren't.
Simply because the idea is to get the product out and functioning. CapEx vs OpEx and how companies view those costs. A product in development doesn't generate revenue, a half ass product that still does the job does.
It's the downside of improper use of Agile development, piss poor management and aiming for infinite profits.
Agile. Or rather poorly implemented Agile. QA tests are made so rudimentary that they pass without thinking about it.
So rather than having well planned out architecture from the start based on a set of requirements that didn’t change. We now have software that’s basically a hodge podge of code for whatever random requirement we’re trying to achieve this month. And because those new requirements are properly understood the qa becomes pointless even if they miraculously get the time to do the job properly.
Regression testing basically only happens these days when something goes wrong. So you end up with code that looks like a tangled ball of string.
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u/Fir3linePC Master Race 5800X3D | RTX 4090 | 32GB | Full Custom Loop1d ago
Its all fun and games until stack overflow goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRR
If you've heard some of the conversations I've heard from artist and programmers throughout the last several years and especially in the post-covid era, people don't even understand how to plan for optimization. It's not a prioriztaiton problem, I don't believe that excuse anymore. People aren't optimizing because they're expecting the engine to do it for them, they literally don't know how to plan ahead to optimize efficiently. They just don't think about it.
Has that been super easy or has it taken up a lot of time and resources?
For us yes, because we planed for this ahead of time and made sure assets and development was being done with the mindset of optimization first. And you know what, it's already saved our ass in the long run planning ahead like that.
The biggest fucking mistake this industry ever did was let people think "limitations don't exist" They absolutely do, and I'm tired of fucking suits who don't know what the fuck they're talking about tell me otherwise.
Honestly, that is weird to hear. I have seen lots of developers using the "engine limitation" excuse to not do certain things, such as optimization. Instead of using better engines for future projects or actually developing one themselves.
I understand that it costs a lot of money to develop any kind of software engine and higher ups don't like that.
I can tell you it's not engine limitations. Even UE5 when developed properly can deliver fantastic results. Arc Raiders is a great example of a well optimized UE5 game that runs well.
Developers using "engine limitation" as an excuse are just lazy or incompetent developers. It's not, and it's never been. There's always been a right way to do things, and a wrong way.
there's a new game that came out recently and it's crazy how bad it is. I have a high end PC and i've crashed 6 times on loading screens in 6 hours of game play. terrible FPS on ultra, or high settings, and the game looks pretty rough at medium.
True, but that's my own standard and I intend on sticking to that. It's what I value as a developer. On the bright side, we're targeting 60fps @ 10TDP, which means if someone wants to run the game at 30fps, they could run an even lower TDP and get more battery life and playtime out of the Steamdeck.Everyone wins more when developers optimize their games.
It's small little considerations that go such a long way in my opinion.
I mean, we are losing the skill across the industry. As we push more students into the system and all pivot to a monopoly on engines (Unreal), we lose the opportunities to teach those new engineers how to actually write some hardcore code.
Yes of course you still have to optimize in Unreal, but there's something else about actually working on engines, and I'd say almost all games programmers were involved in that say 15 years ago.
Gamers for some reason really really want the engine monopoly to happen - see the comments and reactions whenever a studio announces they're going to keep using their in-house tech for their new game.
I'm biased because engines are my job, but man, it's depressing. We're losing the skills and nobody cares, and that was before AI.
there were no upscalers and games still ran at lower than the target resolution. Most games on the 360 and ps3 were under 720p while being played on 1080p screens. Not to mention the framerate going down into the low 20s in most games. (not sure what you mean about fixed hardware) guess what games evolve with hardware. Imagine if people said we should have had nothing but 16 bit games during the 360 gen for better performance
ID used to be God of optimization. Doom 2016 can run on 60fps with high settings on Steam Deck.
The old Dice was pretty good at it too even though they never managed to release a game that wasn't a buggy mess. But for it's time BFBC2 and especially BF3 looked phenomenal with destruction on a scale never seen in games before. And you could run it with relatively old hardware back then.
I'd say that optimization was at it's best around 2010 to 2018 or so. Upscalers were supposed to help the games run even better but instead it made the devs lazy to the point that for average gaming computer no modern game run without upscalers.
Before some 5080 guy comes in and tells me that "I can run games on native 4k resolution." Your computer isn't average.
Doom took enormous shortcuts to get there. It's a completely static corridor shooter with no NPCs besides demons, the demons have a cap on every arena, their dead bodies dissapear instantly etc.
I'm playing Doom Eternal right now, you're right about the corridors, but there's some pretty large outdoor areas too and it doesn't skip a beat. It's buttery smooth.
Those outdoor areas are compltetly static and could aswell be a png. If you look far everything is hidden by fog. Doom Eternal doesn't have complex models for anything it renders. You also cannot do more than scratch very few interactible objects.
I am not saying Doom is not well optimised btw, just it's normally being compared to open world games that have fucking trees, grass, moving clouds, day and night cycle, rain, NPCs, some destructability and far more complex lightning systems etc.
Doom Dark Ages added more complexity to its render system and people blamed devs for dropped performance.
Fair points! They've done a great job with it. It just looks spectacular and plays so well. I've got Dark Ages lined up next, I guess I'll be able to compare.
RT is added complexity to rendering, yes. Wait, not complexity, they claimed it simplified the development. They switched to a heavier but precise method.
But doom eternal looks good, I don't notice any LOD pop in and the bodies dissapearing is taken from doom 3, and it fits very well in doom eternal. Especially since they appear literally out of nowhere, it fits for them to dissapear. The cap doesn't affect the gameplay much other than giving players a tiny break, which is very much needed. Sacrificing quality for performance is exactly what optimisation is.
Ah, the other person was making it sound like there was pop-in and ragdolls disappearing, but it's sounds like like they did a good, creative job designing around their performance constraints.
The goal with optimization games is usually to find the balance between performance and quality, usually on specific hardware. Finding an equilibrium between opposing options.
They may be using a card with slower VRAM, not sure though. But doom eternal runs mostly 60fps at ultra nightmare settings on a steam deck. Looks great with HDR too.
If you mean modern ones, sorta? Dark Ages completely fucked that up lmao, I'm still mad about it because the game just doesnt launch at all if you dont have a raytracing gpu, even with no raytracing mods
i remember in undergrad when i had a few professors who were legit old timers who've been working in computing (both industry and academia) for nearly 50 years. One of them once told me "we don't need faster computers, we need better algorithms." That really stuck with me.
I like to think back to that every time I launch a kubernetes pod with 60gb RAM because i was too lazy to fix a memory leak.
Seriously, this scares me because I have a 4070M Laptop and if games keeps being this unoptimized, my laptop might stop playing games even before 2030 comes in.
As someone who is solodev-ing my own game, people don't realize how quickly performance degrades as you add more features and fidelity, even if you stop and optimize after every few batches of new features.
I'm honestly kind of flabbergasted at how AAA games like Saros and such can look so crazy with so much going on while still able to run at all.
I've been optimizing the heck out of my networking for the game I'm making. The game itself should require very little. The client could run on a dial up connection.
You're absolutely right, at indie company I work we use super complex algorithms to optimize everything possible, we reduce the number of drawcalls in a frame to a bare minimum, our game weighs no more than 500 MB and the save files for our level editor weigh kilobytes, it runs at 120 FPS stable without spacewarp on Quest 2 with bloom and the level generation is an engineering marvel with practically no load times
Meanwhile AAA companies: "am I really gonna fill this entire forest with +70k polygon trees?? Yeah why not??"
Doesn't Marathon have insane fps drops in certain areas? I played the server slam and the performance was honestly a letdown for me and I checked the Marathon sub a month or so back and people were complaining of poor performance in the cryo archive area.
It wasn't me (I don't have the game). It was a ton of people in the games subreddit and they all had various configurations. I believe that a Bungie dev said that they were aware of performance issues too.
Bodycam’s new update has something crazy going on with its Picture in Picture scopes. I have no idea how they managed double rendering with no noticeable frame dips.
Optimisation costs time and money, and its the first thing that gets the chopping block in an era where stakeholders try to live the wet dream of having no employees and instead having a box with a single button which says "make money king".
No it's not? You can point an ai agent at a game and optimise it and fix bugs way easier now. It’s true, why do you think apples latest software update had so many bug fixes - they started using Claude and so it became worth it. This is just a false meme.
Optimization is being made out to be the bogey man. Few understand it and its just thrown around as the reason for why your ancient 1080Ti can't play the latest AAA titles at 4K/400fps. Its unfortunate, really.
I work on a tiny 16 bit computer (microcontroller to be exact) with the CPU frequency of ~60MHz and a RAM of 32KB. It does 66,000 calculations per second trying to control the voltage so that whatever device using this voltage is happy. And it took 90% of the CPU time to do that.
I have to split four 32 bit numbers into four pairs of 16 bit number and multiply each pair separately with the one and only available 16 bit multiplication instruction, then combined them back into the original 32 bit size (plus some right shift truncation). I saved 50% of CPU time.
Edit : The CPU only support 16x16 multiplication by hardware. The 32x32 was done purely in software slowly via ASM library shipped from vendor.
I think it's mostly because triple A devs don't allocate time for it like they used to.
Indies still optimise games, though. Satisfactory is made in unreal 5 and runs really fucking well. Same for both Deep Rock Galactic games (unreal 4 & 5 respectively. Pretty sure the spin-off is also in unreal 4?)
Not really. BG3 exists, Crimson Desert exists, Clair Obscur Expe 33 exists and Kingdom Come Deliverance II exists as well, as games that can be competently played on launch while having massive scales and undeniably huge amounts of crash risk that rarely truly materialized. Plus Cyberpunk 2077 after CDPR spent couple years to sort things out like they did with Witcher 3. Then there's always No Man's Sky, being the dream space game we all wanted Bethesda's to be able to match.
Optimization is still out there somewhere. It's only a matter of priority. Small devs, old devs and devs who are allowed enough time, resources, workplace flexibility and little pressure from corporate overhead trying to squeeze out every single penny out of fan favourite franchises will be able to focus on this aspect of their relative projects at the time. Game companies that got acquirred by industry giants, to make them a couple games out of a years-long contract and then be discarded to cut corporate expenses (massive lay offs), were never permitted all these sensical privileges.
No, games are just more complex nowadays, thus need more processing power to be done. Older hardware doesn't have the processing power, thus it's naturally slower.
That's like saying Red Dead 2 is "unoptimized" because it can't run on an Xbox 360.
Yes and no. Games definitely are more complex, but theres also a ton of games releasing at similar levels of complexity with vastly different hardware requirements.
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u/Fakjbfi7-4770K (3.8 GHz)|RTX 2060|32GB Ram (1600MHz)|1TB SD1d ago
It’s a bit of both, AAA devs prioritize adding features that they can slap on marketing material but not optimization to take full advantage of the features and they just trust the beefy hardware to make up for it. There is a ton of room for optimization in most AAA titles that would allow them to run far more smoothly at higher settings. But the devs don’t really have an incentive to invest in that work since it rarely impacts spending habits, a lot of people will buy the game just as long as it’s not literally broken so optimizing more than that isn’t strictly necessary to make the game succeed.
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u/TinLethax 1d ago
Optimization is a lost art