Best and worst optimized PC games?

[pmv]

Saints Row 2: Has a pretty legendary reputation as a bad port. The game won't even run at the correct speed without tweaking using a third part app.

GTA4: Also known for running like absolute crap. The fact that its saddled with R*SC and GFWL didn't help its case either.

Bethesda Games: Their awesomenes is easily rivaled by their sheer technical incompetence. Bethesda, please take your coders out back and beat them to death with flaming badgers.

Obsidian Games: See Bethesda Games above

Isn't the issue with Bethsda that they use a third-party-created game engine? And the coding problems are mostly with that engine?

Also, maybe this needs a distinction between 'bugs' and 'dreadful performance on hardware that ought to be able to run it'? SR2 is only beaten by Cryostasis on the latter count, IMO.

 

[Pogolauncher]

Battlefield 3 is pretty well optimized. Minecraft on the other hand...

 

[Anarchist420]

Good thread. I'd say one of the best optimized games was Tomb Raider Legend even if it had to be patched.

Devil May Cry 4 also, even though DX10 mode wasn't really any better than DX9; Capcom really learned from the first lost planet.

Quake 3 engine games were very well optimized IMO even if they also were patched multiple times.

The first Unreal back in '98 was well-optimized as was Half Life 2.

GTA IV, Devil May Cry 3, and RE4 were some of the worst IMO. No rotated grid aa and the fact that it was so slow when it shouldn't have been.

 

[Staples]

Simcity 4 still plays like crap 10 years later.

 

[futurefields]

Started playing Assassin's Creed 2 today. The game itself seems really good, but the graphics have some major issues with the shadows/LOD pop-in. It is very glaring, I googled it and it looks like everybody complained when it came out and ubisoft never fixed it, shame on them.

 

[Elcs]

Rift doesn't seem very well optimised. Runs on a single core in a multi-core world... MMO's...

 

[JeffMD]

Worst: GTA IV

It wasn't optimised for PC at all, is was a performance disaster, even on a quad-core with 2Gb VRAM. What a disaster.

You know.. I can't really say it was awful, it still outperformed the console versions. And for the time it was the best looking game out there, featuring a well detailed open world and was one of the few games doing full world shadowing. Considering the console performance, the engine itself was just slow.

I think my worst optimised games of all time is 2 recent ones. Planetside 2 and guild wars 2. Guild wars 2 is not real bad but they really needed to pull out all the stops in order to get all its nice candy and effects at playable speeds while maintaining battles that can have close to a hundred players on screen at once. Yet looking at cpu utilisation we can see it isn't using most of the capabilities of a quad core system.

Planetside 2 however takes the turkey. I love the game to death, but its load times suck, flying into bases suck and it isn't unusual for half the squad to say they missed the drop in a galaxy because they all lagged out while their computer loaded the terrain in. And it is the only game I have seen where many if not most players have the game crash when logging out, but even after a years worth of patches and because it just happens when you log out, they never fix it.

Lucky for us, planetside 2 is being fixed up for the PS4 and they are now doing a game wide optimisation pass because they have to make the game preform on what could be classified as a mid-high range pc. When we will see these is anyones guess.

Elcs, is it fare to call it optimised though when even old high end PCs have no frame rate issues on it? I remember playing in the public beta, graphics wernt that complex and the frame rate seemed to agree.

 

[skipsneeky2]

GTA4 is by far the worst i have seen right next to Planetside 2.

Majority of the games with the Unreal Engine 3 are pretty awesome as far as optimization goes,UT3 and Bulletstorm could be maxed out minus aa and it could play well over 60fps at any given time on a card like a gtx560 ti at 1200p and i know this engine is sorta old but its my favorite.

BF3 is another one.

 

[alangrift]

Battlefield 3 is pretty well optimized. Minecraft on the other hand...

I think Minecraft is designed to be blocky. It is amazing on the PC, if you have a gaming PC you can even get super fast framerates.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Neverwinter Nights 2 among the worst, still runs worse on my machine than Crysis.

This. On release it was basically unplayable on the lowest settings on a 8800GTS, which had just come out. After dozens of patches they got it up to ~40FPS with most settings high, but if you crank shadows/grass you're into a slideshow again.
For a game that looks like this:


image hosting

 

[shortylickens]

NWN2 saw vast improvements in performance and features with each patch.

Unfortunately by that time I was bored and moved on.

 

[sweenish]

BF3 and the Max Payne series have really stood out as well optimized games on PC.

Most Square-Enix stuff of late also seems pretty well optimized. I've played Hitman Absolution, Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Just Cause 2.

I'm still not sure if The Witcher 2 is poorly optimized, or the game is just that demanding.

Minecraft comes to mind as poorly optimized, though. Given it's graphics, I shouldn't have struggled to run it. Probably more Java's fault than anything.

Phenom II X4 clocked at 3.1 GHz, Radeon 5750 (soon to be GTX 760! :-D )

 

[JeffMD]

This. On release it was basically unplayable on the lowest settings on a 8800GTS, which had just come out

When the 8800gts just came out, it was designed to be a budget upgrade to the entree level 8600, and was no where near the powerhouse the 8800gtx was.

 

[Barfo]

Crimson Skies ran pretty bad.

 

[Barfo]

The first Unreal back in '98 was well-optimized as was Half Life 2.

Looks like you didn't play HL2 at launch. Stuttered a lot and loading screens everywhere.

 

[Carfax83]

Borderlands 2 has been pissing me off lately. Apparently, this game has a CPU thread handling issue that has plagued the game since it was released, and it still hasn't been fixed....although it's been improved from what I've read.

The problem is more likely to manifest itself when PhysX is turned on to high, but from my own tests, and the tests of others, it's clear that PhysX isn't the source of the problem.

Whatever extensive modifications Gearbox made to the Unreal Engine 3, the CPU thread handling is seriously jacked up as the engine seemingly has difficulty managing more than four threads.

So if you have a hyperthreaded quad core or a hex core, you're probably going to see random stuttering and lag at times regardless of how powerful your hardware is.

Tossing PhysX into the mix escalates the problem, because even if you run PhysX on the GPU, the CPU still has a big part to play.

I really want Gearbox to fix this issue finally, as it's dampening my enjoyment of the game..

 

[lamedude]

UT99 ran like crap on K6 (I guess 3dfx were the only one make 3DNow optimizations). Those numbers are probably without bots so its unplayable in SP. Too bad I didn't know about the DX7 renderer that added hardware TnL when I had it it might have been playable with a Geforce.

 

[skipsneeky2]

I posted about gta4 being god awful,i posted some benchmark and in game frame rate numbers in the GTA4 thread both at 1200p and even at 1280x800 ,want a laugh go check it out.

 

[FalseChristian]

Quake, IMHO, was the best optimized game ever made. It had a super-advanced true 3D game engine that would actually run on my old Pentium 166Mhz MMX with a shit 2MB ATI 3DExpression video card at 1024x768 at over 30 fps...and this is in software mode!

I think FarCry3, Metro 2033 and the original Crysis were poorly written and even with my new system of today Crysis is just playable at 1680x1050.

 

[Stringjam]

Bad:

Stalker

I never had any problems running STALKER, especially with prefetching disabled (which helped load times tremendously). Call of Pripyat, however, had - and still has annoying stuttering issues, despite being able to run it above 60-70fps on average.

 

[skipsneeky2]

I think FarCry3, Metro 2033 and the original Crysis were poorly written and even with my new system of today Crysis is just playable at 1680x1050.

Wow,the benchmark game from 2007 is finally maxed out on a gpu set up that has been criticized by some in this forum for just simply being massively overkill for your resolution,shows what they know huh?lol

You even getting lucky with applying some AA and if so how much?What sorta framerate are you getting?

 

[FalseChristian]

QUOTE=skipsneeky2;35450573]Wow,the benchmark game from 2007 is finally maxed out on a gpu set up that has been criticized by some in this forum for just simply being massively overkill for your resolution,shows what they know huh?lol

You even getting lucky with applying some AA and if so how much?What sorta framerate are you getting?[/QUOTE]




Amen!!! Thank you for understanding. I'm getting at least 60+ fps at 1680x1050 with SLI and 8xAA as I have vsync on.

 

[Sonikku]

Best: Half Life 2

Worst: Knights of the Old Republic. Never was there a game so good, that ran, well, so bad.

 

[Oyeve]

Giants: Citizen Kabuto.

For best and worse. It started off as the worse buggy game ever then optimized as great. I miss games like this.

 

[Stringjam]

QUOTE=skipsneeky2;35450573]Wow,the benchmark game from 2007 is finally maxed out on a gpu set up that has been criticized by some in this forum for just simply being massively overkill for your resolution,shows what they know huh?lol

You even getting lucky with applying some AA and if so how much?What sorta framerate are you getting?

Well, to be fair, there is still no other game that has attempted to render that much dynamically lit / animated vegetation (with amazing sub-surface scattering). There is a reason why even modern games don't have half the density or nearly as broad of FoV as Crysis.