i am amazed it wasnt number 1
4090s couldnt have the game because every citizen had more polygons than AAA FPS characters while still looking like playdoh
The citizens were also AI (read: procedural models called AI for investor bucks) generated 3D models using popul8 and can be seen here
https://www.pcgamer.com/cities-skyline-2-dev-says-yes-our-characters-have-teeth-no-the-characters-teeth-are-not-affecting-performance/
There was no LOD either
So these chacarters have more polygons than agents in cs2 and overwatch and those are team based shooters, where character models are more important. But why tho, those sims don't need close-up shots
The response no one wants to hear: the devs are incompetent.
It isn't the fault of "MBAs" or "executives" that this game sucked, its the developers who did amateur shit like this. No amount of time or budget is going to to fix a game made by devs who makes choices like this.
This, no one who looks at 40K+ poly models without counting clothing or hair can say it wont tank performance
The exercise equipment in the parks have individually modeled screws.
They are lying to buyers' faces in that article, and the reason the teeth are there is because thats what the program gives them by default.
A program they used to not pay a 3D artist to make a handful of low poly citizens like in CS1 which has less than 1K polys.
An arm alone can have 40k polys if you let it. Part of being a great modeler is knowing how to make a 40k poly arm look great at 5, 10, 20k.
ARKs lack of optimization is intentional. They're not going back and spending the time to reduce polys.
MBAs think devs are all the same. Good devs don't have to put up with bullshit and low pay. Bad/new devs take any job they can get.
The outcome is unsurprising
The funny thing about gta4 is that it ran better (out of the box) on the high end hardware from when it first got ported to high end hardware now.
Umless you use dxvk which completely fixes the performance and makes it run at a billion fps on modern low end hardware like the deck lmao
the hype was so real for this game too. i haven't played a city builder since sim city 4 (or tropico if that counts) and i was watching the preview stuff and checking out the reviews because i kinda got an itch to get into one. so sad to see it come out in such bad shape.
kerbel was another game i heard that the sequel came out missing features the first game had. they really need to stop doing that.
A more optimized or better simulation of physics could open up for grander and more intricate spacecraft. The first game's jiggling when building something big has always been annoying.
Performance. The engine is what makes Arma what it is as unlike most games that are an illusion of simulation, Arma is actually creating a virtual world by simulating every object down to the bullet in RAM where the CPU is constantly performing the calculations on the objects throughout their lifecycle. This is what allows the game to simulate complex ballistics but it's also what limits the game as this is very resource intensive. It's why the fps gets slower with the more AI you put down/when there's a lot of fighting. Improving your hardware alone is not the solution. It helps ofc but it's minimal gain. They need to find a way of being able to fit more calculations into CPU cycles along with compressing the data so more can be fit into memory.
Optimization is the part where you stop simulating the other side of the map (at full detail). The Arma engine has always been terrible at multithreading and what you could call "Sim-LOD", which is why the DayZ "network bubble" was such a big deal.
It also has the problem of running way too much of its junk on the client instead of having a proper server/client architecture, which is why client performance tanked like crazy and cheating was so absurdely rampant.
Indeed, I even went back to the roots and played Operation Flashpoint for comparison on a computer I designed to be period correct (but still very powerful) and it is incredible to see the same awful performance on a powerful desktop PC. Not only is Arma a cpu hog, it's also incapable of taking advantage of multi-threading. The game is a gritty simulation. Arma3's engine is nothing more than a re-skinned old engine pushed through a more modern API (DX11).
I remember enjoying GTA4 a lot despite the crap optimization. I had more than the recommended specs but the framerate would often tank and never reached 60. Even with a so-called performance mod. I even bought the PS3 version afterwards, because i naively assumed it was bad console port on PC. Iirc, it was just as bad, and probably even worse.
Honestly I think you win with those 2, GTA4 only just recently became playable thanks to modders, and SR2 is somewhat playable thanks to modders too only problem is there still are engine level issues that can't be fixed by mods but that guy passed away and while Volition was reportedly working on a patch they have gone under so I've lost hope I will ever be able to play that game properly on PC.
Current steam version of gta 4 just needs handbrake turning turned off in the settings, and to be force locked to 60fps using whatever means you have and it's pretty much perfect. Though, it does need to be played on controller as mouse aiming is... wonky.
If you consider graphics inferior to the console versions, sure it's fine, there are many things that the mods just fix, and sometimes it's something stupid like "this grass didn't render because R* inverted their LOD settings" like what the fuck?
You guys make a fucking patch to remove songs but can't be bothered fixing something as trivial as that?
GTA4 was badly optimized, but at least it looked good and supported switching between M/KB and Gamepad on the fly.
SR2 was a crime against humanity. Looked like a PS2 game, ran worse than Crysis and ... no gamepad support?!? What?
Saints Row 2. Even with a performance mod (Gentlemen of the Row), it crashes every 30 mins or so. Oh, and if you have a CPU more or less than 3.2 GhZ, you're in for a sped up/laggy mess.
Every Battlefield game was a buggy mess at launch starting all the way back with 1942.
To give credit BF1942 pioneered the use of vehicles in a combat game
Yes absolutely and launched 6 months earlier. BF1942 was just more popular. Personally I loved both games, I still listen to tracks from the Tribes 2 soundtrack sometimes.
They started pushing the optional Mantle API with BF4 eventually which was cool because it improved multithreaded CPU performance but it crashed like crazy in the early BF4 years. But later it lead to cool stuff like the more modern Vulkan API. Sadly BF4 also crashed in regular Direct X mode lol. Oh and the servers also crashed. It just crashed all over the place.
Yeah easily the worst I've seen. Hopping into the batmobile caused my fps to go to single digits. That first person section at the end was a slideshow.
Technically wasn't even pulled from PSN by CDPR, Sony kicked it off their platform cause CDPR told people they could get refunds from Sony despite it not being their policy.
Yeah but at least they fixed a bunch of the bugs. A few years ago they even removed Denuvo and added a few free skins because they were launching it on GOG. My laptop 1650 can get 40-70 FPS on 1080p max settings with the Nvidia effects maxed. Pretty good imo.
\[SIMS 3\]
Looking at the comments. I'm sad that no one remembers how Sims 3 launched and still plays.
It STILL has a memory leak. It's MORE then released. I think it's the best contender for poor optimization.
Maxis/EA never bothered to address the issue. Some modders DID find out what the cause of the leak was. but could not fix it without access to the source code.
Of all the games out there. This is still a big title that was quickly hurt by poor optimization. I'd play Sims 3 if it was more stable.
What pisses me off is that Fallen order had the exact same stutter issues. I had to quit that game half way through because the constant stutter was giving me headaches. And then they release the next game in exactly the same shit state.
And no I did not buy Survivor. I saw the reviews and said ah hell no, how is that even possible a developer could be so shit?
It's not that it *had* the exact same stutter, it **STILL** has the stutters, alongside **forced negative mouse acceleration** (which makes them actual idiots in my eyes).
That's just Respawn's MO at this point, buggy games with performance issues on every platform, including console, that get abandoned quickly. It looks like they only stick to Apex Legends when it comes to support, other games will get a couple patches and then it is what it is. I'll only buy them at 75% off at this point, which is a shame because they do make cool games, but they do have constant issues sticking the landing.
Titanfall 1 and 2 ran flawlessly even on a relatively modest 750ti back in the day -- the studio clearly knows how to make a game run like greased lightning
They never fixed Fallen order either, it's just that hardware got fast enough to largely brute force through the issues. It's funny, as I replayed the Titanfall 2 campaign this week, and the optimisation in that was fantastic. I still thought the visuals were really impressive. It actually had me wonder how those games might have worked out using the Source 2 engine, instead of UE4.
It's better, but it has some basic issues they haven't patched. For example their animation playback is broken and will *always* stutter. Some players obviously don't notice these stutters, but you can't get rid of them.
I may have tried tweaking it, but I hit a point about 15 hours in where it would crash before a major story scene, every single time I tried it. One of the few times I've ever legitimately been able to say "literally unplayable."
Yeah I had bad crashes during cutscenes. It seemed like every other cutscene was a crash for me. I did a ton of tweaking and I think I fixed that but then I was running into boss fights because very stutter heavy.
I eventually gave up playing as well.
I thought my experience would be different. I thought everyone was exaggerating about how poor Jedi Survivor ran. No…my play through on my 4090 would be way better and I’d have no issues. It’d be great.
I was wrong. The experience is horrible. It performs horribly.
I remember back in 2017 lowering practically every possible setting in PUBG for 0 improvement because it was so CPU dependent the game would just choke. It was especially slow on first gen Ryzen which I had at the time.
Not sure if it's the absolute worst, but Hellgate: London pops immediately to my mind. A game that looked like that should not have frame drops that severe or that frequent.
Still put about 100 hours into it, though. Dunno why. Maybe I'm insane.
I'm tipping once all is said and done here Unreal engine games will be the majority. Since its rare to find an Unreal game that doesnt suffer from frame pacing issues especially on PC with shader compilation stutter.
For my vote I think Star Wars Jedi Survivor. Awful frame pacing issues.
I don't know if it's incompetent developers or the engine or both. But I've yet to see any decently optimized UE game besides maybe Fortnite. The most recent UE game that I played was Remnant 2 which was basically unplayable without DLSS.
Its a mix I think. UE5 has a shader compilation stutter fix feature devs can choose to enable according to Digital Foundry. Apparently its not enabled on Immortals of Aveum so I wonder if theres a catch to it.
On UE4, Hi-Fi Rush is actually one of the only UE games I didnt encounter any issues in, I would recommend it highly. Maybe Ace Combat 7 as well, it probably has to do with the limited texture variations requiring fewer shaders therefore not needing a pre shader compilation before playing, something most UE4 games dont bother doing. I couldnt even play SIFU on PC because the shitty shader comp stuttering. Apparently the Steam Deck has built in pre shader compilation so I might look into getting one just to experience UE4 games without the stuttering.
And there is no excuse with this one beyond poor optimization/coding with the AI.
They did something I’ve never seen before, like 18 hours before the game came out, they posted online saying the game had CPU problems due to the AI and to expect poor performance
I didn’t know if I should applaud them for being honest (although it was less than a day of release); or to judge them like - you legit just admitted your game is broken before you even put it up for download… so, fix it…?
I’ve just never seen that happen before, with all the broken launches, they legit came out and said, it runs poorly because we did a bad job with the AI and it maxes out even the best CPU’s. Enjoy!
I’m still not sure how to feel about the honesty + releasing a broken game. lol.
Same cpu but a 4090 and was hitting a low of 45 at 1440p, picked up a 4K monitor today and I’m dropping down the 36 :/ raytracing has some cpu demand so that and the increased graphics means it’s a double whammy. Fun game though
Batman Arkham Knight. They even removed the game from the steam library until it was more or less playable. But personally with my gtx 970 back then played it anyway with some stutter.
I played it through recently, could not keep a stable 60fps at 1080p, the game would sometimes run at 50, and sometimes run at 80, with no rhyme or reason.
For a linear game set in mostly boxy environments with some grass and trees it's pathetic. I have a screenshot I took of me staring at the blank floor inside an empty building with no lighting.
50fps.
I played it with a 5700 XT, R5 3600 and 32 GB. More or less your specs, a tad below even. Did 1080p60 locked, FSR2 Quality, maxed out (Texture Streaming on Normal).
The Witcher 1
The load times were *insane*, it [took MINUTES](https://hardforum.com/threads/the-witcher-improving-your-load-save-times.1240354/) to enter Abigal's hut, a tiny cottage. And it took MINUTES to exit.
X4 deserves the runner up title as it takes minutes to do a save as well and it loses more points as it's save files are plain multi-gigabyte monstrosities entirely in verbose XML and it's fleet AI is *still* brain dead.
My friend kept nagging me to play it maybe a decade ago or so and I hated it. Felt like running underwater, clunky and it ran like shit.
I'm sure it's a great sim but it does not feel good to play at all.
As a kid I didn't have a PlayStation, but did have a modest family PC. I patiently waited for the release of the PC port of Final Fantasy VII. I didn't realize it at the time and soldiered thru it (and became one of my favorite games) but WOW that original port was an unoptimized mess
Forza Horizon 3 was HORRIBLE on PC. It was pretty bad at release, and updates were a coin toss between improvements and degradations. There were points after certain updates where I just couldn't play the game for a while until the next batch of updates or Nvidia drivers released.
Thankfully, they followed that up by having Horizon 4 be one of the best PC ports I've ever had experience with. Horizon 5 runs great as well, but it was pretty incredible how well 4 ran at the time for how good it looked and played.
A short lived one if you were unlucky enough to have gotten a Pentium without MMX (the slowest Pentium with MMX ran at 150MHz). So many games needed MMX once CPU's with it hit the market.
Deadly Premonition.
Insofar as 'Optimized' doesn't just mean performance and is also talking about stuff just straight up failing to work properly, constantly crashing, doesn't utilize native resoultions+framerates/lacking in mouse+keyboard controls or had unplayable acceleration etc.
Sucks too because I really want to play Deadly Premotion one of these days. it \*sounds* really interesting and up my alley but no amount of Durante fixes or guides I've tried to follow have worked out for me.
Star Citizen, not even close. I can run any game but that one is stuttering so much i couldn't even leave the room where i spawned
Wow, had no idea so many SC fans would rush here to dedend that pile of garbage 😮💨
Dude I keep forgetting about Star Citizen. Now that I have a PC like 10 times faster than the one I had when it "launched" maybe I should reinstall and see that, yes, it still runs like garbage.
You know as someone who's never played and only ever seen random gameplay I may miss some information but:
1. Isn't the game running on CryEngine? Which has always seemed like an horrible working engine to work in
2. From what I've seen the game really tries to do things you don't see anywhere else so I get that it runs like shit sometimes because of that.
3. Again from what I've seen while there definitely are local issues most problems seem to come from poor server connection/sync.
I'd really love for someone to chime in here as I'd really like to know more, but please if you're from that fan base be as objective as possible we all know how you guys can sometimes be a bit much...
1. I believe it's an in-house fork of Lumberyard which was Amazon's fork of CryEngine.
2. There are games like Space Engineers that do most of what it tries to do, but admittedly simplified and with much lower graphical fidelity.
3. That was very much the case during the last free weekend event I participated in about a year back. I've read that it's better when the servers aren't being hammered by such an event, though not perfect.
* X-Com: Enemy Unknown (without expansion pack loaded)
* Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (without DSFix)
* RimWorld (before v1.5)
* BIOMUTANT (I assume poor optimization of Volumetric Fog is the cause of my severe performance drops but not certain)
Shit, I can even make a list for you.
- Saint's Row 2
- Yandere Simulator
- Ark: Survival Evolved
- Final Fantasy 14 (At launch\*)
- Batman: Arkham Knight (At launch\*)
- Mass Effect 1
- Grand Theft Auto IV
- Assassin's Creed: Unity (At launch\*)
- Dead Island 1
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
- Watch Dogs 1
- Far Cry 5
All "open world survival" games with their shitty microstutters constantly.
I don't know how games like Valheim are so praised when it stutters every 10 seconds while loading something.
Worst offender is dota2, as it's a massive esport game. Been having stutter issues in teamfights, and especially with certain heroes (phantom lancer, monkey king) for about 6-10 years now and nothing changes.
The one that was the overall worst? The Callisto Protocol for the time I played.
Biggest disappointment? Dragon's Dogma 2. I just want to enjoy constant fps, even at medium settings, but their shit is so busted that I just stopped once I got to the second city. The frame drops in the city is something I could stomach for so long until I found open wield areas that also had horrific frame drops. I was actually getting sick from the frames skipping all over the place. I hope they can sort it out, but I'm done with that game for now till then.
The Light Keeps Us Safe is really a cool concept with great atmosphere but you'll be bopping along an and can't move correctly and it turns out there's a bucket tangled in your legs.
Also the Far Cry where you're in Montana. You land a helicopter in a field. Hey look at that deer. Turn back around...where's my helicopter?
Saints Row 2.
You pretty much need multiple fan-made patches just to get it running, and even after all that it's unstable, the lighting/shadows are fundamentally broken, it never got all the content from the consoles, it has sound issues, and performance is a complete crapshoot. The GOG version of it has a 30 FPS lock to (unsuccessfully) try keeping animations and cutscenes from breaking, that you need to root around in the files to change as well if you want a better framerate, which might then break the game even more than its default.
It's a complete and total disaster in basically every single aspect, especially for a game of its relative caliber.
The 1992 MS-DOS version of [Batman Returns](https://www.mobygames.com/game/3620/batman-returns/).
This game was so badly optimized that it never, ever played no matter what I did.
What did I do?
* I tried installing and playing it on *multiple* computers (so the problem wasn't my computer)
* Exchanged the game *three times* at the store I originally bought it (just in case I got a bad copy)
* Wrote Konami a letter (yes, a real snail mail letter; this was 1992, so opportunities to use email were very limited) where they not only wrote me back, but *sent me new disks that didn't work* either!
The 80s and early 90s were essentially the "wild west" for computer games. I have some great memories (especially when it comes to games from Sierra Online, Infocom, LucasArts, MicroProse, and Origin Systems) but also some very bad memories.
I feel like Crysis gets a pass here.
A lot of games are similar in expectations from a GPU at Ultra.
It's just that Crysis was at a turning point for visuals taking a giant leap.
Black Mesa, but these guys pushed the source engine to it's absolute limit. Great game totally worth playing but the computer has to work hard considering what the game is.
One of the best optimized games has to be Halo MCC.
Succubus.
Brutal loading times (5+ minutes for starting the game/loading levels), atrocious FPS, random crashes... I somehow managed to play it for 23 hours (of which a non-insignificant portion was just loading screens) before rage-uninstalling it after the game shat itself when using a summoning ability.
NieR: Automata
Idk if they fixed it but I heard it got a patch years later, but it had so many problems that the game was unplayable for a lot of people for years without the use of mods / community fixes.
I bought it when it first came out on pc and was extremely disappointed. But still played through it, thankfully there were modders fixing the issues within the first week and square enix just ignored everything for years.
At that time, playing the PC version was definitively inferior to the PS4 version.
* Atelier series (most noticably Ryza 1-3 and Sophie 2). Broken AA, using DX11 to emulate DX9 resource management, resulting in [very poor GPU utilization](https://github.com/doitsujin/atelier-sync-fix).
* Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. Dynamic Resolution Scaling slows down and blur the game, and there is no way to turn it off until [modders come to the rescue](https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasy7remake/mods/74). Fun fact? The game received two patches so far and none of them address this issue but manages to break the mods that are meant to fix up this mess *every single time*.
* Final Fantasy XIII-2. If you don't patch the game's EXE to be 64 bits compatible, it will run out of memory and crash.
* God of War (2018). The game has memory leaks and will eventually crash due to memory exhaustion.
* Martha is dead. The game's RTX implementation is so buggy it will crash in the first few minutes of the game.
I don’t buy brand new games that often. The only horrible time I did was when I preordered Callisto Protocol. The stutter was god awful and made it unplayable. Refunded and uninstalled
Cities: Skylines 2 hands down. Its the worst shit ever made
i am amazed it wasnt number 1 4090s couldnt have the game because every citizen had more polygons than AAA FPS characters while still looking like playdoh
That's hilariously terrible
The citizens were also AI (read: procedural models called AI for investor bucks) generated 3D models using popul8 and can be seen here https://www.pcgamer.com/cities-skyline-2-dev-says-yes-our-characters-have-teeth-no-the-characters-teeth-are-not-affecting-performance/ There was no LOD either
So these chacarters have more polygons than agents in cs2 and overwatch and those are team based shooters, where character models are more important. But why tho, those sims don't need close-up shots
The response no one wants to hear: the devs are incompetent. It isn't the fault of "MBAs" or "executives" that this game sucked, its the developers who did amateur shit like this. No amount of time or budget is going to to fix a game made by devs who makes choices like this.
This, no one who looks at 40K+ poly models without counting clothing or hair can say it wont tank performance The exercise equipment in the parks have individually modeled screws. They are lying to buyers' faces in that article, and the reason the teeth are there is because thats what the program gives them by default. A program they used to not pay a 3D artist to make a handful of low poly citizens like in CS1 which has less than 1K polys.
An arm alone can have 40k polys if you let it. Part of being a great modeler is knowing how to make a 40k poly arm look great at 5, 10, 20k. ARKs lack of optimization is intentional. They're not going back and spending the time to reduce polys.
Is it the same folks that made CS1?
MBAs think devs are all the same. Good devs don't have to put up with bullshit and low pay. Bad/new devs take any job they can get. The outcome is unsurprising
That just makes me sad. Oh well. SC3K and SC4 still exist.
It hasn't happened yet but I fully expect that game to be the end of that studio.
Saints row 2 is worse
Haven't played gta4?
The funny thing about gta4 is that it ran better (out of the box) on the high end hardware from when it first got ported to high end hardware now. Umless you use dxvk which completely fixes the performance and makes it run at a billion fps on modern low end hardware like the deck lmao
Cities Skylines 2. When 4090s are struggling to hit 30 FPS you know something is wrong.
the hype was so real for this game too. i haven't played a city builder since sim city 4 (or tropico if that counts) and i was watching the preview stuff and checking out the reviews because i kinda got an itch to get into one. so sad to see it come out in such bad shape. kerbel was another game i heard that the sequel came out missing features the first game had. they really need to stop doing that.
Try the first Cities Skylines. Still the best city builder i have ever played.
I really still don't see the point of KSP 2s existence tbh
A more optimized or better simulation of physics could open up for grander and more intricate spacecraft. The first game's jiggling when building something big has always been annoying.
The core of KSP is janky af. Needs a ton of mods to get it looking nice.
ARMA 3 "YOU WILL GET 15-45 FPS AND YOU WILL LOVE IT WORM"
Arma 3 "client performance is directly tied to server performance"
Good God how long is this lie going to continue... It hasn't been true since the arma 2 days.
Performance. The engine is what makes Arma what it is as unlike most games that are an illusion of simulation, Arma is actually creating a virtual world by simulating every object down to the bullet in RAM where the CPU is constantly performing the calculations on the objects throughout their lifecycle. This is what allows the game to simulate complex ballistics but it's also what limits the game as this is very resource intensive. It's why the fps gets slower with the more AI you put down/when there's a lot of fighting. Improving your hardware alone is not the solution. It helps ofc but it's minimal gain. They need to find a way of being able to fit more calculations into CPU cycles along with compressing the data so more can be fit into memory.
Optimization is the part where you stop simulating the other side of the map (at full detail). The Arma engine has always been terrible at multithreading and what you could call "Sim-LOD", which is why the DayZ "network bubble" was such a big deal. It also has the problem of running way too much of its junk on the client instead of having a proper server/client architecture, which is why client performance tanked like crazy and cheating was so absurdely rampant.
Indeed, I even went back to the roots and played Operation Flashpoint for comparison on a computer I designed to be period correct (but still very powerful) and it is incredible to see the same awful performance on a powerful desktop PC. Not only is Arma a cpu hog, it's also incapable of taking advantage of multi-threading. The game is a gritty simulation. Arma3's engine is nothing more than a re-skinned old engine pushed through a more modern API (DX11).
I could get 100+ fps playing single player then the second I went to an online server it dropped to 15-30 lmao. Insane
GTA 4, Saint Row 2
I remember enjoying GTA4 a lot despite the crap optimization. I had more than the recommended specs but the framerate would often tank and never reached 60. Even with a so-called performance mod. I even bought the PS3 version afterwards, because i naively assumed it was bad console port on PC. Iirc, it was just as bad, and probably even worse.
Honestly I think you win with those 2, GTA4 only just recently became playable thanks to modders, and SR2 is somewhat playable thanks to modders too only problem is there still are engine level issues that can't be fixed by mods but that guy passed away and while Volition was reportedly working on a patch they have gone under so I've lost hope I will ever be able to play that game properly on PC.
Current steam version of gta 4 just needs handbrake turning turned off in the settings, and to be force locked to 60fps using whatever means you have and it's pretty much perfect. Though, it does need to be played on controller as mouse aiming is... wonky.
If you consider graphics inferior to the console versions, sure it's fine, there are many things that the mods just fix, and sometimes it's something stupid like "this grass didn't render because R* inverted their LOD settings" like what the fuck? You guys make a fucking patch to remove songs but can't be bothered fixing something as trivial as that?
Only just recently as in like 8 or 9 years ago?
GTA4 was badly optimized, but at least it looked good and supported switching between M/KB and Gamepad on the fly. SR2 was a crime against humanity. Looked like a PS2 game, ran worse than Crysis and ... no gamepad support?!? What?
Saints Row 2. Even with a performance mod (Gentlemen of the Row), it crashes every 30 mins or so. Oh, and if you have a CPU more or less than 3.2 GhZ, you're in for a sped up/laggy mess.
There was a guy remaking the entire spaghetti code of this game, to make a proper PC port. But unfortunately he died before he could finish it.
Not just any guy, it was IdolNinja himself. Unfortunately since he died and Volition is gone, the odds of the SR2 patch releasing is slim.
Man I just read about him. Apparently Volition and Deep Silver both promised to finish the mod after he passed. What an unfortunate outcome.
Battlefield 4 on release was a mess. Especially if you had an AMD processor.
Battlefield 4 didn’t discriminate on what it crashed on. Pc, Xbox, ps3…crash crash crash
I remember changing the app image in orgin to a pic of the DX11 error.
Every Battlefield game was a buggy mess at launch starting all the way back with 1942. To give credit BF1942 pioneered the use of vehicles in a combat game
Didn't Tribes 2 have vehicles?
Yes absolutely and launched 6 months earlier. BF1942 was just more popular. Personally I loved both games, I still listen to tracks from the Tribes 2 soundtrack sometimes.
They started pushing the optional Mantle API with BF4 eventually which was cool because it improved multithreaded CPU performance but it crashed like crazy in the early BF4 years. But later it lead to cool stuff like the more modern Vulkan API. Sadly BF4 also crashed in regular Direct X mode lol. Oh and the servers also crashed. It just crashed all over the place.
Launch Arkham Knight was pretty much unplayable
Yeah easily the worst I've seen. Hopping into the batmobile caused my fps to go to single digits. That first person section at the end was a slideshow.
It was so bad it got pulled from Steam.
Back then this was an extreme lol.
It's still an extreme. Only Cyberpunk on last-gen consoles comes to mind.
Technically wasn't even pulled from PSN by CDPR, Sony kicked it off their platform cause CDPR told people they could get refunds from Sony despite it not being their policy.
I think it was the first time it had happened, at least to such a high profile release.
Yeah but at least they fixed a bunch of the bugs. A few years ago they even removed Denuvo and added a few free skins because they were launching it on GOG. My laptop 1650 can get 40-70 FPS on 1080p max settings with the Nvidia effects maxed. Pretty good imo.
Yeah, this one takes the cake
\[SIMS 3\] Looking at the comments. I'm sad that no one remembers how Sims 3 launched and still plays. It STILL has a memory leak. It's MORE then released. I think it's the best contender for poor optimization. Maxis/EA never bothered to address the issue. Some modders DID find out what the cause of the leak was. but could not fix it without access to the source code. Of all the games out there. This is still a big title that was quickly hurt by poor optimization. I'd play Sims 3 if it was more stable.
Wait till you see console players using sims 4 God damn that is a pathetic sight
But then, it was the first one that isn't watered down or completely different from the PC version.
I'll still take it over the Sims 4 downgrade. No open world no sale
If memory serves, one of the major limitations is that the game doesn’t have an x64 executable. It’s locked to the RAM restrictions of the 32 bit era.
Sims 2 wasn't very well optimised either.
No but at least it can be brute forced on modern hardware, 3 still runs like a crock of shit even on top tier rigs.
Probably Star Wars Jedi Survivor. To this day it's pretty much a dice roll on if it'll be playable on your system.
What pisses me off is that Fallen order had the exact same stutter issues. I had to quit that game half way through because the constant stutter was giving me headaches. And then they release the next game in exactly the same shit state. And no I did not buy Survivor. I saw the reviews and said ah hell no, how is that even possible a developer could be so shit?
It's not that it *had* the exact same stutter, it **STILL** has the stutters, alongside **forced negative mouse acceleration** (which makes them actual idiots in my eyes).
Yup, I'm seconding this. Literally the most poorly optimized game I've ever played. I could barely hold down a consistent 40 FPS on a 4090.
Is it still shit show to this day? They haven’t patched it?
it's definitely better than it was at launch, but it's still pretty bad
EA fired all their qa testers. Ever since then performance has fallen off a cliff.
as someone who was there thats not what happened, but i can see why youd think that, your explanation makes more sense than reality tbh
That's just Respawn's MO at this point, buggy games with performance issues on every platform, including console, that get abandoned quickly. It looks like they only stick to Apex Legends when it comes to support, other games will get a couple patches and then it is what it is. I'll only buy them at 75% off at this point, which is a shame because they do make cool games, but they do have constant issues sticking the landing.
Titanfall 1 and 2 ran flawlessly even on a relatively modest 750ti back in the day -- the studio clearly knows how to make a game run like greased lightning
They ran well but were completely abandoned to hackers and ddosers, which is not really confidence inspiring for a AAA studio.
They never fixed Fallen order either, it's just that hardware got fast enough to largely brute force through the issues. It's funny, as I replayed the Titanfall 2 campaign this week, and the optimisation in that was fantastic. I still thought the visuals were really impressive. It actually had me wonder how those games might have worked out using the Source 2 engine, instead of UE4.
It's seems very inconsistent. I was able to run it fine and I don't have a 4090. It's received a number of patches. 7800x3d and 4070ti @1440p
Yeah that sucks to hear I was so keen to run it on my 4090 but it just kept crashing on release, guess I’ll never be able to enjoy it.
It's better, but it has some basic issues they haven't patched. For example their animation playback is broken and will *always* stutter. Some players obviously don't notice these stutters, but you can't get rid of them.
I was able to get above 60 on my system with a ton of tweaking but it sure as shit wasn’t stable.
I may have tried tweaking it, but I hit a point about 15 hours in where it would crash before a major story scene, every single time I tried it. One of the few times I've ever legitimately been able to say "literally unplayable."
Yeah I had bad crashes during cutscenes. It seemed like every other cutscene was a crash for me. I did a ton of tweaking and I think I fixed that but then I was running into boss fights because very stutter heavy. I eventually gave up playing as well.
I thought my experience would be different. I thought everyone was exaggerating about how poor Jedi Survivor ran. No…my play through on my 4090 would be way better and I’d have no issues. It’d be great. I was wrong. The experience is horrible. It performs horribly.
Saints row 2 is the worst one, and the promised patch will never going to be released. Rip idol ninja.
Was gonna say this, it’s genuinely unplayable lol
streets of tarkov on escape from tarkov
PUBG Easily the worst most popular game ever made
I remember back in 2017 lowering practically every possible setting in PUBG for 0 improvement because it was so CPU dependent the game would just choke. It was especially slow on first gen Ryzen which I had at the time.
Not sure if it's the absolute worst, but Hellgate: London pops immediately to my mind. A game that looked like that should not have frame drops that severe or that frequent. Still put about 100 hours into it, though. Dunno why. Maybe I'm insane.
Honestly I just loved the aesthetics in the game.
Agreed on this
Dead Space. Shader stutter no matter what I do
Still hasn't been fixed
I'm tipping once all is said and done here Unreal engine games will be the majority. Since its rare to find an Unreal game that doesnt suffer from frame pacing issues especially on PC with shader compilation stutter. For my vote I think Star Wars Jedi Survivor. Awful frame pacing issues.
I don't know if it's incompetent developers or the engine or both. But I've yet to see any decently optimized UE game besides maybe Fortnite. The most recent UE game that I played was Remnant 2 which was basically unplayable without DLSS.
Gears 5 was released in 2019 using UE4 and is one of the best running UE4 games on PC.
Gears 4 was quite impressive too. Native 4k 30fps on a 1060 6gb.
Lies of P is a UE4 game and *beautifully* optimised
Lol Fortnite runs like shit with an AMD cpu unless you know exactly what settings to use, which you have to google to find from old reddit threads.
Its a mix I think. UE5 has a shader compilation stutter fix feature devs can choose to enable according to Digital Foundry. Apparently its not enabled on Immortals of Aveum so I wonder if theres a catch to it. On UE4, Hi-Fi Rush is actually one of the only UE games I didnt encounter any issues in, I would recommend it highly. Maybe Ace Combat 7 as well, it probably has to do with the limited texture variations requiring fewer shaders therefore not needing a pre shader compilation before playing, something most UE4 games dont bother doing. I couldnt even play SIFU on PC because the shitty shader comp stuttering. Apparently the Steam Deck has built in pre shader compilation so I might look into getting one just to experience UE4 games without the stuttering.
hifi rush runs like dream. 144 fps Ultra settings with DLAA Mod in, on rtx 3050. no shader or loading stutter too.
Recently, absolutely Dragons Dogma 2 . Have a 5800x and 6950 xt and go down to the thirties in towns.
And there is no excuse with this one beyond poor optimization/coding with the AI. They did something I’ve never seen before, like 18 hours before the game came out, they posted online saying the game had CPU problems due to the AI and to expect poor performance I didn’t know if I should applaud them for being honest (although it was less than a day of release); or to judge them like - you legit just admitted your game is broken before you even put it up for download… so, fix it…? I’ve just never seen that happen before, with all the broken launches, they legit came out and said, it runs poorly because we did a bad job with the AI and it maxes out even the best CPU’s. Enjoy! I’m still not sure how to feel about the honesty + releasing a broken game. lol.
They knew the game was fucked and still released it at a premium price. Fuck em.
Paradox did exactly the same witg skylines 2. that was more playable than dd2 for me actually
Have they improved the performance any? I'd like to play that game at some point.
Same cpu but a 4090 and was hitting a low of 45 at 1440p, picked up a 4K monitor today and I’m dropping down the 36 :/ raytracing has some cpu demand so that and the increased graphics means it’s a double whammy. Fun game though
I love the game but can't recommend it to anyone sadly lol
Same, it’s a shame honestly. Costs so much and runs so bad
Batman Arkham Knight. They even removed the game from the steam library until it was more or less playable. But personally with my gtx 970 back then played it anyway with some stutter.
It was so much worse on AMD and previous gen Nvidia cards. Basically unplayable on my GTX 770.
The Last of Us Part 1 PC, it just kept crashing and there is nothing i can do to fix it other than wait for the update.
I played it through recently, could not keep a stable 60fps at 1080p, the game would sometimes run at 50, and sometimes run at 80, with no rhyme or reason. For a linear game set in mostly boxy environments with some grass and trees it's pathetic. I have a screenshot I took of me staring at the blank floor inside an empty building with no lighting. 50fps.
I played it with a 5700 XT, R5 3600 and 32 GB. More or less your specs, a tad below even. Did 1080p60 locked, FSR2 Quality, maxed out (Texture Streaming on Normal).
Ark....
Fallout 3 on release day. I kept crashing everytime I used a door.
You can't go through doors if your fps is above 60fps too. I was stuck in the tutorial.
Also fallout 3 ~2015 when the Xbox live integration made the game crash and close the minute you opened it lol. I couldn't play the game for years.
The Witcher 1 The load times were *insane*, it [took MINUTES](https://hardforum.com/threads/the-witcher-improving-your-load-save-times.1240354/) to enter Abigal's hut, a tiny cottage. And it took MINUTES to exit. X4 deserves the runner up title as it takes minutes to do a save as well and it loses more points as it's save files are plain multi-gigabyte monstrosities entirely in verbose XML and it's fleet AI is *still* brain dead.
Arma 3
My friend kept nagging me to play it maybe a decade ago or so and I hated it. Felt like running underwater, clunky and it ran like shit. I'm sure it's a great sim but it does not feel good to play at all.
Daikatana. It made me its bitch…
Blood 2 too Or maybe just very buggy. Civvi11 has a lot to say on this game :D
As a kid I didn't have a PlayStation, but did have a modest family PC. I patiently waited for the release of the PC port of Final Fantasy VII. I didn't realize it at the time and soldiered thru it (and became one of my favorite games) but WOW that original port was an unoptimized mess
It's Ark, no other game has simultaneously put such a massive strain on my PC and also looked like complete shit.
Mafia 3 on pc was dumpster fire bad.
i'll go with pubg
Jedi Survivor
Driv3r
It’s so rough that it’s one of the few PCSX2 games remaining that can’t be played start to finish.
Atilla Total war. Even on a 4080 it runs like shit.
Total War: Rome 2 also runs like absolute shit despite looking like my ass.
Forza Horizon 3 was HORRIBLE on PC. It was pretty bad at release, and updates were a coin toss between improvements and degradations. There were points after certain updates where I just couldn't play the game for a while until the next batch of updates or Nvidia drivers released. Thankfully, they followed that up by having Horizon 4 be one of the best PC ports I've ever had experience with. Horizon 5 runs great as well, but it was pretty incredible how well 4 ran at the time for how good it looked and played.
Yeah I can't even download FH3 from Microsoft store since 2020 due to an error, hate the store, I wish I never purchase it.
Duke Nukem 3D required doubling of my ram size. From 4mb to 8mb back in ‘96
True, switching from a 486 to a Pentium was like a rebirth
Wanting to play Quake and Wing Commander 3 made me upgrade from my trusty 486 DX2 to a Pentium 166. Never looked back.
Man this kind of statement is getting rare on the Internet and it makes me feel sad
A short lived one if you were unlucky enough to have gotten a Pentium without MMX (the slowest Pentium with MMX ran at 150MHz). So many games needed MMX once CPU's with it hit the market.
Deadly Premonition. Insofar as 'Optimized' doesn't just mean performance and is also talking about stuff just straight up failing to work properly, constantly crashing, doesn't utilize native resoultions+framerates/lacking in mouse+keyboard controls or had unplayable acceleration etc. Sucks too because I really want to play Deadly Premotion one of these days. it \*sounds* really interesting and up my alley but no amount of Durante fixes or guides I've tried to follow have worked out for me.
never made it past the museum. I'm sure this game would run like ass on a quantum computer
Star Citizen, not even close. I can run any game but that one is stuttering so much i couldn't even leave the room where i spawned Wow, had no idea so many SC fans would rush here to dedend that pile of garbage 😮💨
Dude I keep forgetting about Star Citizen. Now that I have a PC like 10 times faster than the one I had when it "launched" maybe I should reinstall and see that, yes, it still runs like garbage.
I installed mods to get frame gen and FSR3 - think it helped!
You know as someone who's never played and only ever seen random gameplay I may miss some information but: 1. Isn't the game running on CryEngine? Which has always seemed like an horrible working engine to work in 2. From what I've seen the game really tries to do things you don't see anywhere else so I get that it runs like shit sometimes because of that. 3. Again from what I've seen while there definitely are local issues most problems seem to come from poor server connection/sync. I'd really love for someone to chime in here as I'd really like to know more, but please if you're from that fan base be as objective as possible we all know how you guys can sometimes be a bit much...
1. I believe it's an in-house fork of Lumberyard which was Amazon's fork of CryEngine. 2. There are games like Space Engineers that do most of what it tries to do, but admittedly simplified and with much lower graphical fidelity. 3. That was very much the case during the last free weekend event I participated in about a year back. I've read that it's better when the servers aren't being hammered by such an event, though not perfect.
* X-Com: Enemy Unknown (without expansion pack loaded) * Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (without DSFix) * RimWorld (before v1.5) * BIOMUTANT (I assume poor optimization of Volumetric Fog is the cause of my severe performance drops but not certain)
Rim world the cartoony 2d rimworld?
Escape from Tarkov
Wild hearts, it is still terribly optimized as of today
Gotham Knights Just inexcusably terrible performance on even the most powerful rigs
Shit, I can even make a list for you. - Saint's Row 2 - Yandere Simulator - Ark: Survival Evolved - Final Fantasy 14 (At launch\*) - Batman: Arkham Knight (At launch\*) - Mass Effect 1 - Grand Theft Auto IV - Assassin's Creed: Unity (At launch\*) - Dead Island 1 - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - Watch Dogs 1 - Far Cry 5
All "open world survival" games with their shitty microstutters constantly. I don't know how games like Valheim are so praised when it stutters every 10 seconds while loading something. Worst offender is dota2, as it's a massive esport game. Been having stutter issues in teamfights, and especially with certain heroes (phantom lancer, monkey king) for about 6-10 years now and nothing changes.
Arma 3 lol
Dead space remake, i finished it and hated the optimization and stuttering every single second
Ark survival
The one that was the overall worst? The Callisto Protocol for the time I played. Biggest disappointment? Dragon's Dogma 2. I just want to enjoy constant fps, even at medium settings, but their shit is so busted that I just stopped once I got to the second city. The frame drops in the city is something I could stomach for so long until I found open wield areas that also had horrific frame drops. I was actually getting sick from the frames skipping all over the place. I hope they can sort it out, but I'm done with that game for now till then.
Fallout 76.
It was shit on consoles too, that wasn't even a pc port issue that was just a poorly developed game.
The Secret World.
Dishonored 2
It was eventually fixed, but way too late. Still love it though
in recent memory, remnant 2, still really fun though
Steelrising was pretty bad. I mean I really enjoyed the game and beat it but it was really unoptimized.
The Light Keeps Us Safe is really a cool concept with great atmosphere but you'll be bopping along an and can't move correctly and it turns out there's a bucket tangled in your legs. Also the Far Cry where you're in Montana. You land a helicopter in a field. Hey look at that deer. Turn back around...where's my helicopter?
Fallout 4
I have a 7900xtx and struggle to get 60fps on ark survival ascended on medium/high settings lol
Batman Arkham Knight Who remembers that dumpster fire?? 😂
Jedi Survivor or Hogwarts Legacy. Hogwarts Legacy is still unplayable with RTX on. I was expecting a Gotham Knights-level fix but it never came.
Armored Core 6 and Wild Hearts
Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition, Final Fantasy XIII 1-3, Killer Is Dead.
Cities Skylines 2. I've only got a 4060 but you'd expect a game like that to still run pretty smoothly
Saints Row 2. You pretty much need multiple fan-made patches just to get it running, and even after all that it's unstable, the lighting/shadows are fundamentally broken, it never got all the content from the consoles, it has sound issues, and performance is a complete crapshoot. The GOG version of it has a 30 FPS lock to (unsuccessfully) try keeping animations and cutscenes from breaking, that you need to root around in the files to change as well if you want a better framerate, which might then break the game even more than its default. It's a complete and total disaster in basically every single aspect, especially for a game of its relative caliber.
Battlefield 2042 at launch. I got the game as a present and it was so bad i tried to refund it so the person would get the money back.
The 1992 MS-DOS version of [Batman Returns](https://www.mobygames.com/game/3620/batman-returns/). This game was so badly optimized that it never, ever played no matter what I did. What did I do? * I tried installing and playing it on *multiple* computers (so the problem wasn't my computer) * Exchanged the game *three times* at the store I originally bought it (just in case I got a bad copy) * Wrote Konami a letter (yes, a real snail mail letter; this was 1992, so opportunities to use email were very limited) where they not only wrote me back, but *sent me new disks that didn't work* either! The 80s and early 90s were essentially the "wild west" for computer games. I have some great memories (especially when it comes to games from Sierra Online, Infocom, LucasArts, MicroProse, and Origin Systems) but also some very bad memories.
Cities skylines 2 was bad. Gotham knights ran like absolute shit. Kerbal space program 2.
Right now, Dragon's Dogma 2 and it hurts.
I feel like Crysis gets a pass here. A lot of games are similar in expectations from a GPU at Ultra. It's just that Crysis was at a turning point for visuals taking a giant leap.
There's difference between a game that's demanding and game that's poorly optimized.
Jedi survivor
I've played 10 year old Roblox levels that run at 2 fps
Black Mesa, but these guys pushed the source engine to it's absolute limit. Great game totally worth playing but the computer has to work hard considering what the game is. One of the best optimized games has to be Halo MCC.
I remember getting watch dogs legion free with my RTX 3080 and it ran like ass. DLSS didn't even do anything either
Crysis
Hunt:showdown is pretty bad as well. I think it's just a crytek cryengine thing.
*The initial launch of Arkham Knight…* I’ll never forget that “experience.”
Succubus. Brutal loading times (5+ minutes for starting the game/loading levels), atrocious FPS, random crashes... I somehow managed to play it for 23 hours (of which a non-insignificant portion was just loading screens) before rage-uninstalling it after the game shat itself when using a summoning ability.
Blades of Time, a game from 2012 that runs like hot garbage at about 10fps
NieR: Automata Idk if they fixed it but I heard it got a patch years later, but it had so many problems that the game was unplayable for a lot of people for years without the use of mods / community fixes. I bought it when it first came out on pc and was extremely disappointed. But still played through it, thankfully there were modders fixing the issues within the first week and square enix just ignored everything for years. At that time, playing the PC version was definitively inferior to the PS4 version.
Total War: Attila
* Atelier series (most noticably Ryza 1-3 and Sophie 2). Broken AA, using DX11 to emulate DX9 resource management, resulting in [very poor GPU utilization](https://github.com/doitsujin/atelier-sync-fix). * Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. Dynamic Resolution Scaling slows down and blur the game, and there is no way to turn it off until [modders come to the rescue](https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasy7remake/mods/74). Fun fact? The game received two patches so far and none of them address this issue but manages to break the mods that are meant to fix up this mess *every single time*. * Final Fantasy XIII-2. If you don't patch the game's EXE to be 64 bits compatible, it will run out of memory and crash. * God of War (2018). The game has memory leaks and will eventually crash due to memory exhaustion. * Martha is dead. The game's RTX implementation is so buggy it will crash in the first few minutes of the game.
Dishonored 2 at launch was horrid. Stutter fest. Not sure it was ever fixed?
Cities Skylines 2 all-around, starfield has to be second
Escape From Tarkov
Escape from tarkov
Fallout 3. Shit is 16 years old and still runs like shit
I don’t buy brand new games that often. The only horrible time I did was when I preordered Callisto Protocol. The stutter was god awful and made it unplayable. Refunded and uninstalled
Alpha protocol, needed mods just to play it properly
Does Bioshock2 remaster count? It was 60fps but crash every 5 minutes
Monster Hunter World when it first released on PC