This game is 100% pure crap, thank you consoles, thank you AMD by sabotaging PC industry, ill stick with Mafia 1&2.
This is cringe-worthy to read. PS4/XB1 never stopped great developers from making beautiful 1st and 3rd party games such as The Order 1886, DriveClub, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Uncharted 4, Infamous First Light/Second Son, Doom, Forza Horizon 3, Crysis 3, etc. Upcoming
Horizon Zero Dawn looks amazing. I bet Ghost Recon Wildlands will look great on the PC too.
It's obvious what happened here -- the development studio had no $. As a result, they used a modified version of Mafia II game engine for this title. The Illusion Engine's history goes back prior to 2010 as it was developed specifically for 7th generation consoles (Xbox 360/PS3). It's actually much worse since the Illusion Engine even traces its roots back to Illusion Softworks which underlined 2002's Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. Illusion Engine itself is an evolution of LS3D engine, the engine which was made for Mafia 1, Wings of War and Chameleon. It's possible the roots of the current Mafia 3 engine can be traced back even farther back than the year 2010.
For Mafia 3, there is nothing next gen or advanced to make it a 2016 title -- and AMD is not to blame for any of it. Facial animations are made via FaceFX from OC3 Entertainment. AI is based on Kynapse from Autodesk. Audio and video components are made via FMOD and Bink. There is no advanced underlying physics engine of any kind (and no PhysX since NV is no longer a marketing sponsor). Second, the company clearly didn't even have $ to do a proper port. The Russian version doesn't even have Russian voice overs - it's just English captions/translation overlaid on the screen.
The level of optimization in driving scenes is simply unacceptable. GTX780Ti, R9 390, GTX970, GTX980 cannot even hit 40 fps average at 1080p. At 1440p, everything below GTX1080 cannot even hit 40 fps.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/mafia_iii_vga_graphics_performance_benchmark_review,6.html
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/mafia-iii-vga-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,7.html
The failures of this title in terms of graphics, performance, production value, and selling out to
Sony for PS4 Pro specific graphical updates have 0 to do with AMD:
Creative Director Haden Blackman confirmed as much in an interview
with Gadgets 360.
"I’m always excited about new technology because it means we can push our art even further. For the PS Pro specifically, we’ll add some graphics upgrades."
I feel bad for Hangar 13 developers since they probably worked very hard on this title, but more likely than not were never given the proper financial and human resources to make a great Mafia II successor.
The console bashing and all the blame for poorly optimized console ports aimed at AMD "gimping consoles" is getting tiresome to read. Sony and MS no longer wanted to lose $ on hardware after losing so much $ during the PS3/360 generation. It was no longer viable to sell a $599 console that cost $800+ to manufacture. Besides, we know that for most AAA titles, they would not be sustainable or exist in the current form without the console userbase given how much it costs nowadays to make a massive AAA game:
"
co-founder of CD Projekt Red, Marcin Iwinski, explained to them...
"If the consoles are not involved there is no Witcher 3 as it is, we can lay it out that simply. We just cannot afford it, because consoles allow us to go higher in terms of the possible or achievable sales; have a higher budget for the game, and invest it all into developing this huge, gigantic world."
We should never again expect another console generation like we had with PS3/360. Not only are MS/Sony/Nintendo unwilling to lose hundreds of millions of dollars selling hardware at a loss for a large portion of the console life-cycle, but the current prices of GPUs have increased 50-100% for a given historical tier. Flagship GPUs now sell for $800-1200, mid-range for $400-700 and low end for $180-300. It will never be viable again to sell a $399 consoles with higher end GPUs. Sony/MS will either have to increase the price of the consoles, once again lose hundreds of millions of dollars selling next gen consoles at a loss, and/or AMD/NV/Intel and all the other console part suppliers would have to lower the profit margins to 0.
There is a lot of financial risk in making blockbuster AAA games.
DE:MD only sold 280K copies on PS4, 130K copies on Xbox One as of Sept 10, 2016. Project CARS only sold
230K on Xbox One.
Rise of the Tomb Raider only sold
1.29M copies on Xbox One to date, despite
22M Xbox One consoles. Super Mario 64 sold
11.89M, Mario Kart 64 sold
9.87M, Goldeneye 007 sold
8.09M, etc. Even Bomberman 64 sold
1.04M copies!
Even a snowboarding game on N64 sold more units than Rise of the Tomb Raider did on Xbox One. Compare the production value and entire cost of making of 1080* Snowboarding and Rise of the Tomb Raider.......
It's why smaller studios cannot possibly to take a chance with next gen graphics and then the game's sales bomb anyway. I don't blame this on AMD, but rather on the industry's obsession of launching rushed, broken, unoptimized games for so many years that it alienated many gamers from buying games at launch. To make up for it, developers introduced DLC, which only further cemented the same gamer's stance and alienated even more gamers. Why pay $90+ for a broken/rushed/poorly optimized game when by the time it is fixed, the GOTY version or otherwise a discounted version can be purchased for 1/2 to 1/3rd the price within 12 months of release? Most likely it is the studios who rush developers to launch unfinished games or starve them for financial resources that causes a lot of these issues. There may also be fatigue from playing the same thing over and over. The gameplay in modern AAA 1st and 3rd person titles hasn't been innovated in a while. When was the last time people played a game that was very difficult to beat? There is almost no such thing anymore.