Why Is Game Performance Getting Worse? - Luke Reacts 

I love Devs who look at optimisation right from the start of development

One of the reasons the gaming industry is so comfortable putting out poorly optimized products is that they know gamers will pay top dollar for anything they put out. There's no incentive for companies to properly polish up games before release b/c gamers have proven that they will pre-order and pay full price for whatever they put out, every single time. In 2024 gamers need to grow up, get over your FOMO, and be a little bit more shrewd in your purchasing habits. When devs see that you refuse to pay for a shitty product maybe things will finally start to change.

I think it's two things tbh. Developers with less time to optimise and lack the skills to do it. And devs relying on up scaling for performance instead of optimisation.

It's because games are now AAAA, which means you should stop talking and buy them. If you have a problem that means you are the problem.

I remember advertisements like 10 years ago with games advertising 60fps. The fact that almost no game can achieve that 10 years later is insane to me. IMO if your games can't hit a steady 1080p 60fps AT A MINIMUM, the devs should scale back the graphics or environment clutter or something. 1080p 60fps was a standard almost 10 years ago

This is not a Game problem, this is a Software problem, software performance is in the gutter.

and on PC, where everything "should" run better, we are left in stutter-land

As a xbox gamer primarily I'd take 1440p at 60fps over 4k at 30fps

“We” don’t have 4090s trust me 😂

AC Unity faced wild criticism for being an unstable 900p30 game in 2014 and... look how things are going.

This is am engineering and management problem primarily. I am actually a software engineer. I try so hard not to sound arrogant but the straight fact is that I am one of the hardest working developers on my team. I have my full-time gig that is generally 40-45 hours a week and I have a side contract that is 10 hours a week. I struggle with balance but I LOVE software engineering. The issue with games is three big things, IMO: 1. Finding my level of passion is rare. To be truly great at any craft, you need to make sacrifices. I barely ever have time for video games, drinking at the bar, watching TV, etc. It sometimes feels like my entire life is work. Sometimes it is draining but it is incredibly rewarding for me long-term. I am addicted to solving hard problems. The VAST majority of people I have ever worked with do not possess this trait. They do exactly what they are told and never push back against shitty management. 2. That leads me to: SHITTY MANAGEMENT. You would not believe how little of a priority producing quality software really is. I am constantly fighting deadline after deadline after deadline. It never ends. Everything is short term thinking. I have finally learned to say no and I finish my ticket when I finish. Unsurprisingly, I have shipped far less bugs than before since adopting this attitude and saved man hours in the process because less needs fixed. Furthermore, my solutions are better and easier to come back to in the future. 3. For game dev specifically, why would an engineer like me go there? I don't see the incentive. If I want to do game dev, I can download Unity or Unreal on my own. I've worked on plenty of small games for myself but I would never do it professionally. Not trying to start a fight but pleasing gamers impossible. I know that if I am even associated with a product that tanks when it wasn't my fault, I can have death threats sent my way. Furthermore, the games industry is notoriously a race to the bottom. You get terrible pay compared to other industries and the work is much harder. Every college grad who doesn't know shit will work for free. I am not even attempting to "compete" against that. It isn't worth the time and it is a waste of my skills that have taken over a decade to perfect. So yeah. This is my two sense. It is really an issue of the current work culture we have adopted within the tech industry. Tim Cain's video is spot on, these are just more problems beyond what he mentions.

Just an observation: Instead of running optimized engines and perfecting the tech they had, they moved into Ray-Tracing and other tech that the hardware isn't powerful enough to handle. We have Performance mode and Graphics mode on tons of games now - they all just used to be 1 mode. I'd rather they stop trying to push cutting-edge tech every generation and sugar-coat the fall-out, while other features (like NG+) are becoming more sparse. Think about all the money wasted on Marketing, VR, Live-Service and other under-performing features that could have just gone to paying developers to make a good game.

Making high level fidelity easily accessible for developers without high level experience is the trade off. You lose that level of efficiency and that's the cost with UE5 giant leap in fidelity. Avg developers aren't going to be able to make it efficient.

There is a reason i kept my 1080p tvs. They are just best bang for the buck. High definiton enough to have a beautiful clear picture but old enough to make your dvd collection with upscalers look pretty darn watchable still. Its just the best jack of all trades and i dont mind not having full 4k at all. 1080p has always been enough for me.

TAA is probably another cause of being blurry, on top of the resolution drops. It works by blurring old frame data into the next frame. And I'd consider 454 unnacceptable for the year 2000, considering Diablo 2 was 800x600. Yeah, it was absolutely only SD in the truest form, but even 454p may as well be SD.

Such a SOLID TAKE on how UNACCEPTABLE game quality has gotten all the sudden, and thats on NEWEST CONSOLES , Takin the words outta my mouth man

Jedi survivor is such a beautiful game artistically and then you get to certain parts of the game and the resolutions drops, and you get screen tearing and stutters. It really hurts the enjoyment of the game for people like me who value picture quality and motion clarity in video games. I know some people either don't notice things like that or don't care.

I remember watch one of the creators of Fallout, and Outer Worlds talk about how the industry has changed over the last 20 years. People dont want to be held accountable for their jobs. Along with them getting lazy. They want to get paid for as long as possible while doing the bare minimum of the work. It doesnt take 6 months to get a scorecard in BATTLEFIELD.

Are the consoles really that powerful though? I mean, neither of them can really even hit 4k without DRS, and just like with the Brothers Remake the fact that consoles like Series S can scale down to 540p to upscale just isn't acceptable. My mid-tier PC can run circles around both of the major consoles including with ray-tracing. Even the last gen consoles had problems hitting 1080p (particularly the Xbone) and almost exclusively relied on upscaling too for "4k" resolutions for the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. I really wish that the industry had focused on getting us a locked 60fps for all games over trying to push 4k resolution. The amount of horsepower that would be needed to natively do it is beyond what a console can do without the price of it being the price of a PC.

DEI happened, now they hire people based on skin color and gender but not if they can do the job.

Or it’s just always been these way and people complain far more nowadays. As someone who grew up playing Dynasty Warriors, Oblivion and Drakengard - performance quality has been an issue for a very long time. We just pay way more attention to resolution and frame rate now, thanks to channels like Digital Foundry.

A lot of armchair developers in the comments but it’s a lot of things. Two big ones are rushed development timelines and “get it working, optimize later” mentality. The other most obvious contributor is as game tech improves (ue5) company’s target bigger games (open world, procedural, multiplayer, etc) and wouldn’t you know it all of those are really hard to do. We don’t need 35 open world live service games but executives pushing profits seem to think so.

My perspective as a Dev: Not everything scales linearly. CPU on PS5 is roughly twice as fast as PS4, GPU is 5x more capable. But increasing resolution alone already takes away most of the advantage. On top of that games have higher expectations: More geometry, more NPCs, higher quality shaders, better post processing, higher framerates, all that takes more than the hardware can give. Also, graphics make use of both gpu and cpu. If CPU is already bottlenecked, graphics can take a hit as well. That's where the upscalers come in. But just as a reminder, resolution is part of the whole. If the game is enjoyable, it probably did what it was meant to do.

It's really bad these days. I'm still trying to wrap my head around Dragon's Dogma 2's apparent lack of optimization on consoles, and I strongly suspect it'll be an issue on PC too (they aren't even showing PC gameplay, which makes me very suspicious).

It's really simple, new consoles aren't that powerful and fanboys refuse to hold corporations accountable for any performance standards.

Sony and Microsoft gaslighted customers saying ps5 and Xbox X were 4k consoles, maybe for menu screens but not decent games at levels close to 60fps without excessive upscaling. The next generation of consoles will still struggle with native 4k maybe with upscaling they get close to 60fps games.

ps5 should have been 1080 60 baseline and 1440/upscaled 4k if they had room left. The obsession with 4k is whats killing the console. It cant run 4k native, just not possible above 30fps or worse. So they really should stop trying.

Calling it now that dragon dogma's 2 is going to be the next major technical controversy ESPECIALLY on pc. They are targeting "around" 30 fps??? mf's should be locking that shit to 30fps and that fps isnt even acceptable anymore these days! I am almost bracing for the severe backlash that game is going to get on steam as the PC community has been rightfully enraged with the state of thier ports lately and dragon's dogma 2 is showing all the signs of being the new immortals of aveum.

I would love to see you interview developers from any game and ask the hard questions that most outlets seem to either be afraid of asking or whatever reason just simply overlook

If the consumers are buying with no pushback then it seems you are yelling in a void.

You nailed it on the head with the DLSS point. It’s all about money. From a corporate schmucks perspective, why spend time and money paying Devs to polish and optimize the game for native resolutions when you can do the bare minimum and have gamers use DLSS/FSR to upscale it instead? DLSS was initially groundbreaking for its potential to let low tier hardware play modern games but because of greed it’s ironically turned into the reason almost no hardware can play *any* modern games

Not going to lie, feels like game made for this gen haven’t been made for this gen but more so for the ps pro equivalent whenever that comes out, it’s like “ hey you ain’t gonna get your smooth 60 now but you’ll get it later when the better version of your console comes out”.

Lazy devs who don't want to put in extra work and just want more power to work with.

Give me native 1080p 60 fps minimum with fleshed out game mechanics and no online requirement. How do so many miss this?

Skill issue with modern devs and a lack of a need to optimize because they produce with supercomputers. Im a game dev and I specifically use older generation hardware for the specific reason that it forces me to optimize as much as possible. There is no justifiable reason for this remake to run so poorly, just either incompetent or uncaring devs.

Unreal Engine, Dlss and ray tracing ruining visuals of modern games. While xbox 2001 games emulate in 4k with proper mirror reflections than any modern games.

Yeah… it’s really annoying. On pc its annoying, but on for my ps5, it makes me want to avoid buying games for it. Example: I got ff7 and started it out on graphics mode. Everything looked amazing… then I turned the camera and got somewhere between 10-15 fps. How is that acceptable? So I turn it down to performance and realize that instead of downgrading to 1080p it just uses FSR. Now everything is just really blurry and grainy with weird visual artifacts. If the story wasn’t so good and the combat wasn’t fun, I don’t know that i could continue to force myself to play. I don’t care how much detail is on a leaf or some random rock, just let me play at a reasonable frame rate without outrageous visual artifacts.

I thought it was just me losing my mind thinking how come all these games this generation looks so much worse than some 10 year old games running on my ps4

Honestly, I feel like the performance mode should be between 40-50. It’s so smooth without losing too much of the graphic quality.

13:21 Last time around we went from 30fps to 30fps. I think we also had bigger returns going from 720p to 1080p. Going to 60fps is "taking up" the bulk of the progress.

Because the mainstream “gamer” only cares about graphics. So that’s the feedback the industry gets.

Because some devs are just too lazy to optimize properly, 1440p 60fps should be the standard no excuses whatsoever

At this point I think devs need to stop adding or trying to be the biggest best game and start removing. Gameplay, while being the most important aspect of a game, at this point in time is starting to fall behind performance in terms of importance. At least for me. If I cannot play a game without getting frustrated by stuttering, it doesn't matter how good it is, I will be annoyed and will likely stop playing.

The fact console games have been able to offer a 60fps mode at all this long into this generation is a triumph. 60fps was almost never seen in single player games last gen. Not sure what the argument here is. Xbox Series S is feeling the pain, it’s not the “baseline” console…the PS5 is. They make it fit on the S but it never goes well.

I know what you mean, but working in retail for an online shop that happens to sell hardware as well, looking at those prices chills me to the bone...if we had to buy the latest GPUs and CPUs to play the latest games, PC gaming would straight up die. It's really bad, as in you can make an average PC OR buy a mid-tier GPU...the high-end stuff costs over 2000 Euros...I repeat, 2000€ for a graphics card...we've sold custom PCs that were over 4000 Euros...latest consoles are like 600€...

Most gamers have been saying graphics are good enough for the last 5 years. Why are game developers not concentrating on fps now?

Similar to how very few modern movies can hold up to the original Jurassic Park's cgi. Shareholders and subsequently chasing ever increasing profit margins are to blame

there’s too much focus on graphics for the people with god mode pcs, I love PC but the rise of pc gaming is slowly killing gaming

The oldschool devs had to find very clever ways with the limited hardware that was around at that time to make a simple game just run. But modern devs with supercomputers just think everybody has a 4090 rtx And with AI and upscaling it's going to get worse The old devs with real skill are almost gone

I’ve always said that current gen consoles should “AT LEAST” if run on performance 1440p 60fps…Anything less than that is unacceptable in my opinion

people want better graphics. the requirement for increasing graphics quality is exponentially higher each time, yet the hardware doesn't get exponentially more powerful than the last generation. That's why we need to rely on tricks like AI super sampling, dynamic res, etc. You can technically make an efficient game engine that's super optimized, but it requires a ton of expert programmers to create the tool adn even use the tool. Nowadays most programmers is just a coders, they know how to do stuff and code with simple tools, but not actually make clever solution. Remember, the more simple to use the tool for artist and prgrammers, means the less efficient it run.

honestly being able to have a game be stable at 1440p and using AI upscaling for 4K isnt so bad considering i doubt most ppl have monitors higher than 1440p in the PC side. having a game that's stable at resolutions below 1080p and REQUIRING AI upscaling for higher resolutions is bafling.

The real issue here is everyone jumped on Unreal Engine 5 and skipped optimization due to using dlss or fsr as a crutch. There are exceptions such as starfield but that’s just developer incompetence.

I’m surprised noone’s corrected you on the power of the series s, it’s in no way a suped up one x, fyi it’s gpu is about 2/3rds that of the one x, and it has other cutbacks which makes it a pain to develop for

And faster loading times is not even an achievement of the gaming industry. It's just an SSD that has been around for a long time

30fps unlocked is unacceptable. Coming from Capcom that’s actually very surprising and disappointing since they’ve always been some of the best at optimizing their games since all the way back to the PS2.

Because consoles are weak and they were weak from day 1. DF called it like 2 years ago in an article titled "why the return of 30fps is inevitable" and anyone who knows the tiniest thing about gaming hardware could tell this was coming from the start of the gen. I kept telling fanboys 4k60fps native was NOT going to happen on series X/PS5, it's a very heavy workload for modern games and they just refused to see reality.

6:18 "Such a low number, can't even say it" 👌💀

There are also games that "requires" DLSS just to play the game normally at bare minimum acceptable fps.

More realistic lighting, atmospheric effects, particle effects are extremely taxing, but are all now feasible and what gamers expect (understandably). So devs are likely expected to use them to be competitive, but also don't have the additional time that would be needed to optimize. Honestly I'm not sure our performance will ever match expectations from what gamers are marketed.

I’ve been saying this for a minute but this is the result of technology like DLSS and FSR. They should be closed off to the public dev space until finished. I can always tell native vs that AI slop fest of pixels. Developers now use these technologies to finish their games and optimizations, instead of doing so natively. No game should have access to these unless it can present a steady 60fps at 1440 /2160 on its own.

Optimization is definitely playing a part in it, but I also think that at times hardware is also having a hard time keeping up with what devs are trying to accomplish. 4090 is top tier, but there’s a breaking point for everything.

People need to stop being okay with 30 FPS, it should be standard with the hardware that we have now, especially in console games. 60 FPS or no FPS that’s it

30fps was unacceptable to most PC players in 1998, here we are 2024 and people are intentionally targeting such choppy numbers. It's lunacy you have hardware that can make already beautiful imagery that runs like silk. If you are a developer scale back on the Gucci graphics and use sane amounts of polygons and particlebukkake til your game hits a minimum 60fps on target systems pretty plox with sugar on topz. If a game runs at 30 I'm just not gonna play it no matter what. Even if it's something good I'd love I will wait til the future when hardware have evolved to the point it can actually run the thing you've created well enough that I can enjoy it.

Developers using Unreal don't optimize nearly enough. I can count on one hand the amount of games that perform well enough for how they look, even compared to previous gens. Blur, artifacts, low framerates and stuttering is synonymous with Unreal. The developers prioritize making the best graphics for trailers and model viewers, but nobody actually gets to see the game like it looks in the trailers unless they have a 4090 because it's so damn blurry. Just compare The Witcher 3 from 2015, playing at 4k 60fps easily and compare it to a blurry messy Unreal game at 30fps that looked great in trailers. Even Fromsoft, who routinely get criticized for their graphics, look much better than any Unreal game because at least in Elden Ring and AC6 while at high resolution I can actually see what stuff looks like without a cloud of blur vomited onto the screen to make it both look AND run WORSE than Fromsoft's games. With FS you can use your extra power to have a game look clear and detailed because their graphics aren't cutting edge, but Unreal games might look better technically in trailers but you couldn't tell and instead they look worse because of the damn blur to make it run semi-acceptably. Imagine a Bethesda game in Unreal... the AAA studio who polishes the least on the engine that needs it the most.

The Rapid increase in demand for photorealism/RTX, Resolution, fps has literally hold this generation back when it comes to innovation. look at Battlefront 2 from 2017, it has no RTX or anything but still manages to look better than games realising today with the plus of not having RTX Tank the fps, The game is in my opinion good enough to please the eye, I would take those graphics with expanded gameplay any day!

I was so hyped for 120fps console gaming as the current gen was announced... Jokes aside, it's up to the dwinding number of capable engine devs and for that capable engines. Our best engine devs are right now stuck porting old, ugly ducklings onto subpar hardware, they aren't working on current gen engine optimization or next gen graphics, they are all working on ports and remasters. We have our priorities completely slanted thanks to nostalgia and our talent completely blown into the nether. And the effect of that? The best engine devs leave big companies to start creating their own little studio where they create indi games that look good but can't possibly be at next gen level graphically even with their skill and knowledge, because of tiny, lower pay teams. IMHO we kinda need a crash, we need AAA to flatline for a year, only then can AAA rebuild into something that actually moves forward again.

"Don't need to optimize it, we'll just use DLSS/FSR as crutch!!!" - Lazy Devs

I think it’s mostly due to the publishers implementing denuvo in the games and rushing developers to finish the games, and not giving them a respectable amount of time to develop them. Game devs are really over worked these days.

Cuz everyone got forced into diversity hiring instead of hiring on merit and talent. Ding ding

I’ve been saying this but the push for RT in games is ruining video game performance. I have a 4080 and I don’t even use RT why TF would u want it on ur ps5.

Just because ff7 rebirth has poor performance doesn't mean other games do! It's a square Enix problem. I've not had any performance issue with the ps5 games I've played

I declare a thumb war

No one can even tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps without side by side comparisons. 30 fps on red dead 2 and I couldn’t even tell the difference or didn’t feel a single stutter or anything

On the plus side.. Maybe this will usher in the recreation of CRT's to cut through the crappy resolutions?

"We" are Frustrated. Started up FF7 Rebirth and the Frame rate and Graphics took a dive and I'm just confused

Welcome to the enshitification of development. Nowadays hardware is so powerfull and there is so many software tools that helps something run even when that something shouldn't be running at all. Worst thing that UE5 done was the "now you can import unoptimized assets into the engine, urray" (nanite) that this is going to become more and more frequent. Because the engine being able to deal it doens't mean that all hardwares can. Retopo and LOD are a necessary evil, it is boring as hell and very tedious to make, but it is what garantee a better performance. When you can just shove a model with 3gb into the Memory, the performe will sure take a heavy hit.

Can't wait to start my Indie game dev and not implement upscaling until I can milk out raw performance.

The assets are more graphically demanding now with higher polygon counts and such on top of aiming for more consent framerates that are connected to resolution with resolution scaling as well as bumping up the framerate to 60 fps doesn't help and might as well mention FSR as well

You do everything to pay as little as possible don't be surprised when they do as little as possible.

As much hate as the original requirements for it got, Alan wake 2 has been the best optimised game in a long time on pc. Especially with the latest update.

" Much more blurier resolutions " Luke, there is no thing as " blurier resolution ". And big tv's don't stretch the image they have a lower pixel density. If you really want to talk tech on your channel you need to up your game.

There is no time for optimization or Quality according to the investors that give developers money. They wany their money back as soon as possible which means cutting corners.

I have done some 4k rendering for a 3d project. Not for a game engine mind you.. But 4k took forever to render out a 3d image rendering for. The technology to make it faster when I did the project was not there yet. Or was very unstable.

Well, they need arguments for selling us the „pro“ models of the consoles, don’t they?

Resolution is not the only thing using up resources. Scene complexity, mesh density, lighting and effects, texture quality...

Alan wake runs at 540p natively. Of course they got a pass and even won several awards.

It's interesting because this generation of consoles is more centered around performance rather than graphics

Optimization in general has been the biggest pitfall this gen. Literally everything that's PS4 pro enhanced, looks and runs better, than anything on my series s. Even though the S is technically capable of more, I don't think developers want to put in the time and energy to make a paired down version of their game look good. I think they're frustrated that they have to make 2 versions for Xbox when they already have to make multiple versions for diff platforms.

I think devs just got lazier. Do they even open a profiler during development

Please move the clip from the middle of the background so we can see what you're talking about. 😣

I’d rather have most of my games run at 1440p and 60fps instead of 4K 30fps

Honestly i just think its just newer devs just dont focus on optimization like at all and for pc they target like 2080s as min spec which is wild. Most peeps are still rocking 1060s

The 360 is closer to 20 years older now so way more than a decade lol.

I ain't buying anything on launch unless it has good performance in reviews!

Because devs design for the PS5 since it's the biggest userbase, then port it to other platforms....only to find PS5 fans don't buy anything but COD and FIFA. Stipulating in the Resident Evil 8 Village contract Capcom weren't to make the Series X and S versions any better than the PS5 says it all.

This is def the worse generation i have experienced so far. It honestly feels like these consoles shouldn't have come out until late 2024, proof is they wanna release pro version this year and it doesn't feel like anything was done remotely impressive on these current gen consoles since release.

I completed Brothers a tale of two sons on PC with an RTX 4090 and an I9 13900k and was getting around between lows of 20fps and max around 60fps...

Why would it improve ? It's not like everyone is making ps1 games for the current generation. The tech improves yet so does the ambition of games which would in turn mean there will still be problems

wow... lower than stadard def in 2024 isn't just bad or unacceptable, its a flat out embrassement and failure by the studio. Even if it rests at 720p most of the time that's a failure from the studio as well. With the Xbox consoles and PS5 1080p should be the bare minimum and even then I expect more than that. I mean the original xbox over 20 years ago was doing 720p.