Best and worst optimized PC games?

[Quantos]

Not that most people would notice since it still runs fine on most modern PCs, but minecraft runs like absolute shit considering how awful and simply its graphics are. You'd think it would run fine on netbook level hardware for what it is, but nope!

It's a deceiving game, though. The textures are simplistic (default textures, that is), but the world itself is not. I think most of the issue comes from the algorithm used to build the world. It does so by generating 16x16 chunks of the world based on various factors. Once the chunks are created, things tend to run much better. Lag will thus tend to appear when a player explores the map and much less lag will happen when the player remains in a specific area.

Still, though... it's probably not very well optimized as well

 

[dud]

I don't play many "newer" games as my systems are aged so I won't speak to the best optimized games but the worst that I recently tried is Toy Soldiers, a simple tower defense game that I bought on Steam. The graphics for this game are unremarkable yet the game requires a 1 GB vid card. What's up with that?

 

[JoetheLion]

Few years back when I was still active VG journalist, I often got my hands on review versions of games and gosh, many times there was hardly any optimization at all + games were usually buggy. I was always more happy with the same copies as those that were meant for selling. There was a huge difference. Basically it's like playing beta (sometimes it was that bad) or a v1.0 that needs a big patch to work at least decently.

Anyway, when somebody asked what I am doing and I said that I am writing about video games, they were like "omg, that's the greatest job ever", I had to explain that I have to play early copies, I have a certain amount of time to play (sometimes it was like getting a game on Monday and the article had to be ready on Tuesday) and I cannot just choose to play only the good games (irony is that sometimes the shitty games were in fact a better review material - I wrote the text pretty naturally, naming all the flaws and levels of failure of the game while making fun of the game (my favourite plus in the final verdict was "you can uninstall it" and even though it was pretty much a sarcasm, I've played 2 or 3 budget games that had problems with uninstallation and one even messed up with my windows registry for fonts or something like that).

 

[gorcorps]

Worst: Darksiders 2

Got it cheap recently and still won't play it because of how poorly it runs.

 

[TidusZ]

best: supreme commander (one of the first games to use more than 2 cores, actually scales with your hardware into the future).

worst: diablo 2 (will sometimes run bad even on a current system despite being 13 years old). A pentium 3 450 with a voodoo 3 or something would run this game better than a 5 ghz ivy bridge with nvidia titan

 

[tacosrcool]

Bioshock Infinite. My rig (i7, GTX 670) microshutters for no reason. Horrible

 

[JoetheLion]

I remember how I had everything I've played in 2003 on high configuration, but then Doom 3 was released and I had to play it on low details. So I think Doom 3 qualifies.
Or Morrowind - laggy, slow loadings, crashes...
Neverwinter Nights 2 - this felt like it wasn't optimized at all
WoW - through first or second expansion (I don't remember which one). I was pretty angry this one, I've played vanilla (or TBC) back then on highest possible configuration and then when the expansion came out, I had put everything down to medium or lower in order to not get a lagfest in a raid.

worst: diablo 2 (will sometimes run bad even on a current system despite being 13 years old). A pentium 3 450 with a voodoo 3 or something would run this game better than a 5 ghz ivy bridge with nvidia titan

I don't think that this counts as a bad optimization, it just the technology is too different + maybe it's a problem of your system.

 

[PingSpike]

It's a deceiving game, though. The textures are simplistic (default textures, that is), but the world itself is not. I think most of the issue comes from the algorithm used to build the world. It does so by generating 16x16 chunks of the world based on various factors. Once the chunks are created, things tend to run much better. Lag will thus tend to appear when a player explores the map and much less lag will happen when the player remains in a specific area.

Still, though... it's probably not very well optimized as well

Yeah, its doing some pretty cool stuff. The random world generation from a seed value is quite cool really. But if you read a bit about it you realize things generally don't happen on chunks that the player is not in mean its actually only running the world on a pretty small slice of area. It is programmed in Java which hasn't traditionally been known for its performance and I've heard people say Notch is not a very good programmer. I can't say about the last one, but I've seen a few copy cats that seemed to perform a good bit better. Its just a lot of people list it as a good game with low system requirements. I played it on my amd 1.6ghz laptop with hd3200 graphics, better than traditional netbook hardware...it was pretty choppy on the lowest settings.

 

[Arkaign]

I remember Halo for PC being garbage. It took forever to come out, looked and played like complete crap. Perhaps the first great example of consolization that I can think of.

 

[Black Octagon]

The worst ones in my opinion are those with the dreaded IN BUILT FRAME RATE LIMITERS:
- Dark Souls
- Rage
- L.A. Noire

The best optimised games I've played recently are, without a doubt:
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- Tomb Raider

Oh yeah, and anyone who thinks AC3 is well optimised is insane. Same goes for any Crysis game. Also, I've never played it but I read lots of remarks about how poorly Planetside 2 runs

 

[cmdrdredd]

The worst ones in my opinion are those with the dreaded IN BUILT FRAME RATE LIMITERS:
- Dark Souls
- Rage
- L.A. Noire

The best optimised games I've played recently are, without a doubt:
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- Tomb Raider

Oh yeah, and anyone who thinks AC3 is well optimised is insane. Same goes for any Crysis game. Also, I've never played it but I read lots of remarks about how poorly Planetside 2 runs

Actually crysis runs quite well on my system and even when I had a gtx 280 and e6400 it wan decently at my resolution of 1280x1024 or wherever it was at the time. Crysis 2 and 3 run even better fore than crysis 1

 

[cmdrdredd]

I remember Halo for PC being garbage. It took forever to come out, looked and played like complete crap. Perhaps the first great example of consolization that I can think of.

It was exactly the same as the Xbox game with mouse support and support for higher resolution. No texture updates and such were done.

 

[AFurryReptile]

Dark Souls for sure.

- 30 FPS locked
- no vsync
- stuttering
- 'some' terrible textures
- Mouse/Keyboard doesn't work
- Almost no in-game instructions

Even with all that, the game is f*cking awesome.

 

[Aikouka]

I find it will hang at times. I've got dual 6850s in crossfire but they still struggle with 1080p sometimes. I'll overhaul the rig next year probably. Problem is it needs new everything. Even my case is starting to fall apart, and the DVD drive is IDE.

Doesn't the 6850 have 1GB of RAM? Crossfire and SLI provide both cards with the same data, which means you still have 1GB of RAM. I would guess that's your biggest issue. I play it at 1080p with 2GB, and it was fairly good. I had a few hitching problems in the beginning, but it seemed to get better. I don't know if there was a patch or anything that helped mediate or if a setting got turned off randomly. I checked my settings one time, and I noticed that a few of my settings were turned down, but I didn't turn them down. :\

EDIT:

WoW for some time could really be a bitch depending on which options were selected. I remember that shadows, for instance, did have a very dramatic effect and would slow down the game a lot. That's a few years ago, though, so it probably wouldn't matter with today's hardware anyway.

It just comes down to light-modeled, model-dependent shadows requiring significantly more processing than other solutions. For example, the easiest and laziest thing is just to throw a black circle under the player like the sun is always above them. Then there's blob shadows that take into account the light source's position in regard to the model.

Also, keep in mind that if you're in a big city, you have to perform those calculations for every player model that's currently running around. WoW also used the shadows for things like trees and such, which fortunately, are far more static.

EDIT 2:

WoW - through first or second expansion (I don't remember which one). I was pretty angry this one, I've played vanilla (or TBC) back then on highest possible configuration and then when the expansion came out, I had put everything down to medium or lower in order to not get a lagfest in a raid.

I wonder if it was the significant increase in particle effects? I remember that my 8800GTX had some bad problems with some effects. For example, if I stood in Hellfire Peninsula when the fire erupted from the ground, I would watch my framerate drop 30-50%. However, I'm not sure if that was the video card (I don't think it ever worked right), poor drivers (I used Vista... that says a lot), or poor tweaking on Blizzard's part.

I'd probably be more willing to blame the video card over Blizzard for that.

 

[Dankk]

Anyone remember Cryostasis?

This is the correct answer.

Anyone who mentions any other game in this thread, has not played Cryostasis.

 

[blastingcap]

I almost forgot: Grand Theft Auto IV for PC

 

[Red Hawk]

I'm sorry, are people actually saying Arkham City is a well-optimized game?

 

[Remobz]

Quakelive..............ok...Quake dead!!

I love this comment..

hahaha!!

 

[Raduque]

Metro 2033 is probably the worst optimized game in history. It runs 10x worse than Crysis and other games while looking 1/10th as good.

I disagree. It looks quite good IMO, and it ran very well for me on my modest system with "High" graphics settings.

Crysis is a combination of mediocre optimization and being simply far too demanding.

IMO, Cryostasis is the single worst optimized game in existence. Even if you turn everything to lowest or off and run it at 800x600 it still stutters and jerks and overall gives you low average FPS.

It is a damn shame, because it looks great, the PhysX are immersive, and the story/concept/atmosphere is unique.


As for best optimized, IMO, just about anything running on Unreal Engine tech. All UE3-based games seem to run great and at max settings, look great too.

 

[alcoholbob]

best: supreme commander (one of the first games to use more than 2 cores, actually scales with your hardware into the future).

worst: diablo 2 (will sometimes run bad even on a current system despite being 13 years old). A pentium 3 450 with a voodoo 3 or something would run this game better than a 5 ghz ivy bridge with nvidia titan

Diablo 2 is a 2D sprite game, the Voodoo cards were beasts back in the day in 2D performance, modern GPUs don't perform anywhere near what a dedicated 2D card can do. It's been true for years--if you want 2D performance for example you get a Matrox card, not a 3D gaming GPU.

 

[Clinkster]

I'm sorry, are people actually saying Arkham City is a well-optimized game?

On DX9, sure.

DX11, not so much....

 

[futurefields]

It runs quite well on DX9. Even a fairly low-spec machine should be able to lock 60fps with high/very high settings and SSAO disabled.

 

[MegaWorks]

I can only remember the worst I would say ARMA II Combined Operations, but the funny thing is I still play this game.

 

[mmntech]

Yeah I never played FSX but I remember reading about it.

FSX came out when multi-core was just becoming popular. The game, however, was programmed to take advantage of high clocked, single core processors. They did add rudimentary multicore support in a patch but it didn't do much. Worse is FSX loads a lot onto the CPU. It's not just working on physics but also telemetry, weather modelling, random scenery generation. The latter especially is a big performance impact. Something that should have been left to the GPU.

Doesn't the 6850 have 1GB of RAM? Crossfire and SLI provide both cards with the same data, which means you still have 1GB of RAM. I would guess that's your biggest issue. I play it at 1080p with 2GB, and it was fairly good. I had a few hitching problems in the beginning, but it seemed to get better. I don't know if there was a patch or anything that helped mediate or if a setting got turned off randomly. I checked my settings one time, and I noticed that a few of my settings were turned down, but I didn't turn them down. :\

Hmm, I didn't know that. I always assumed the RAM doubled. Though UE3 does have known stuttering issues which seem to be unrelated to system capabilities.

 

[Broburger]

Best
- Anything from Valve
- OutRun 2006: Coast to Coast
- Devil May Cry 4
- Street Fighter 4
- NFS Most Wanted (2005 good version)
- Mass Effect
- Just Cause 2

Worst
- Devil May Cry 3
- GTA4
- Serious Sam 3