Good Examples on Video Game Optimisation

I don't have much to say besides "remember Rogue Leader"?

While what said is true, I don't think people are going to tolerate 60gb + 30gb day one patch flops for much longer. Surely there must be a point where enough becomes enough.

Optimization isn't only about file size, you dingus, that's probably the easiest part.
Optimization is about achieving efficiency, having a correct relation between hardware demand and graphical quality. You can have a game that looks good but it is impossible to run at acceptable frame rate with current common hardware, a game that looks bad and runs ok or a game that runs badly and doesn't make full use of the hardware (the last one is a fairly common and obvious case of bad optimization). Proper optimization delivers a game that makes full use of the hardware while delivering stable performance with appropriate graphic fidelity levels. Squad is a good example of that.

Bump

You can give as much shit to Dice and how awful this game is but the pump out the graphical power they have achieved out of that engine is pretty spectacular. Too bad they don't spend much time on making their actual games fun.

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I actually looked into why the other day as I was curious, turns out IDs MegaTextures made a comeback in NuDoom.
It's an interesting technology and could prove great in the mid-term but in the short-term existing texture methods are better because they have been perfected over decades.

Personally I have no problem with games getting huge if it means a return to the rapid technological advancement of the early 2000s.

it realy is a shame, i really feels like the devs had a love for starwars, considering how they really tried hard to recreate the atmosphere, visual design, character design and even the pyrotechnics they used in the movies. too bad it's ridiculously expensive if you take in account how much it costs with the seasons pass and how the gameplay isn't all that fun.

I'd kill my entire family with a spoon just to take that Volkswagen Dakar thing for a spin, it is orgasm inducing.

bump

What is with OPs self bumping all of a sudden? This isn't halfchan, it's much slower and people actually use the catalog instead of staring at the first page spamming F5.

Stop doing that, you fucking retard, it's a Sunday, the board is even slower on Sundays, this thread wasn't even close to the middle of the catalog. Stop being so fucking new, cuckchanner.

but i do spam f5, i ain't posting in some page 2 class thread

sorry anons, i didn't mean to upset you

Well, get a car, go by OPs house and pick him up, then head to the nearest wall at top speed and fucking kill you'reself faggot.

kek I got this game for Christmas when I was younger and no joke shit myself because of how good it was.
I had to shit real bad and wanted to keep playing so badly that I pulled a chris-chan

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How does optimization work?

Metal Gear Rising. That shit runs on the toasty toasters.

That one too. Another one to the list (even though it doesn't look that great) is PSO2.
Half life 2 and Far Cry 2 were two games that run very well at the time while still looking alright/good. Of course they are now old, but when they were released they displayed good optimization and even some innovations.

Yeah Far Cry 2 is also a work of wonders. Too bad it is a shit game.

I also forgot Banished, fucking godtier.

i decided to get another hdd and put nsa10 to play this game and my god, microshit does a lot of wrong but they did an amazing job when it comes to optimizing this game. too bad they restricted the game to nsa10 store so theres hardly anyone playing online. Also its the best game using the Unreal Engine 4 without having bad optimization

Anything on MT Framework on PC.

The best way I can explain it in layman terms is; imagine you're making a drawing, at first you're just doing a sketch with rough lines to get a general idea of how it will look, once you have the sketch you start doing the propper lineart. It's more or less like that but with code, you monitor resource consumption and manage resources.

A good developer would start doing minor optimization midway through development so it doesn't pile up. But in general optimization is done at the end of development unless the code is so broken that you can't proceed.

Doom 3 BFG runs on my integrated graphics notebook. It looks like ass, but still.

Isn't doom 3 fucking terrible?

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I'll say Shadow of Mordor as well, it ran like butter on my toaster.

i see someone never tried turning graphics up in that game to realize its optimized like the witcher 3

GTAV isn't even that well optimized, but Rockstar really went all out with the number of options to control the quality and it really helps.

Here's your (you)

witcher 3 runs pretty much maxed on my i5 and 970
60+fps 1080p

da fuck r u doing nigger

Console games did NOT used to be optimized. Rather, hardware was so limited (especially RAM before 7th-gen and mass storage before discs) that in order to get an even slightly playable result, some degree of technical sacrifice was inevitable for most genres, meaning that most developers didn't try to "have it all". This isn't to say most developers did a good job at choosing tradeoffs, however.

For instance, compare three 1st-party N64 games.

F-Zero X is a perfectly optimized game, with a huge number of vehicles onscreen, fast action, and responsive controls, accompanied by decent music and sound, all running at a solid 60FPS. Its spare backgrounds don't particularly detract from its intended mode of play, with its only practical sacrifice being severe fog/pop-in that courses are generally designed to mitigate.

On the other end of the spectrum is Starfox 64, a basically good game marred by an attempt to cram in way too many objects and too much background detail, further exacerbated by the game's chosen genre of twitch shooter. It regularly dips into single-digit FPS, sometimes even hitting fractional FPS at the exact worst times.

Somewhere between the two is TLoZ: Ocarina of Time. On the one hand, it uses basically every audiovisual capability the N64 has with SGI's stock microcode, and is richly detailed. On the other hand, it is locked at 20FPS max, though it rarely dips below 15. This is aided by the game's genre, which mostly consists of moving intentionally through large environments, studying puzzles, and using autotargeting in somewhat rhythmic combat.

It's true that sheer pec-flexing cowboy code of the sort European demoscene coders are (in)famous for can brute force something into running on limited hardware, but for typical commercial games, optimization is simply about making good judgment calls on mutually exclusive tradeoffs and maintaining discipline.

What I think console games need most today is simply to realize 8th-gen hardware gives them enough legroom to offer users the option of choosing their own target. Max FPS, max resolution, both, or neither.

For all the shit and memes it got, the original Crysis is actually an excellent example of a optimization in PC games. On launch, at low settings, it ran better and looked better than most of the competition. At medium settings on top-end hardware, it looked better than any other game and ran solidly. Years later, even without patches, max settings put most competing games to shame visually, and simple patches only widened that gap.

The idea that a PC game should run smoothly (or at all) at max settings on launch is blatant consoletardation. A good PC game scales down to toasters, and upward beyond even the most expensive rig money can buy, producing results appropriate to its computational demand across the scale.

Starfox 64 is badly optimized? What are you talking about? I never had the game drop to what felt like low fps,not even im solar, with all the moving lava it never became unplayable, and the only noteworthy exception i can think off is when the train loaded with weapons crashed into the storage facility in macbeth, and it exploded so hard the game couldn't handle it. But since you don't even play during und that scene, i don't even care. Now, in my oppinion, Ocarina Of Time runs much worse, with it being 30fps at all times and all. Perhaps you played the pal version? Because that would make a lot of sense, since during that time, all games played 10 frames worse…

an F5 press is an F5 press, you can't say its only half.

Go to 31:00 and notice how the framerate fluctuates during the boss fight, especially the lockup each time one of those flame columns ignites.

Also, N64 PAL games weren't quite THAT much worse. NTSC OoT was capped at 20FPS, PAL at 16.66.

…so? I don't care this much about a tiny, barely noticable drop in a games framerate. Starfox 64 is still a fun game with fittingly campy voice acting, nice action, awesomely tight controls… how about you go play it, instead of uselessly analysing the framerate with a shitty yt video?

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Nice counter argument user,it's just my opinion, thats all

This is a thread about optimization, not how good games are. There's plenty of good games that are poorly optimized, sometimes hilariously so (Dorf Fort). There's also plenty of bad games that are well optimized like Mad Max or Battlefront 3.

Yeah, i'm sorry. It's just so contradicting that devs used to be able to work with ridiculously low specs, and yet today are struggling to mantain a smooth fps with both tablet-grade cpus (ps4 and xbox one) and i5s and whatever modern gpus are named

Im speaking in rather general terms, and it's obvious that it's not always the same, but what determines performance? I don't understand.

I'm calling you a retard because there's nothing in his post where he says the game is bad.

Some developers are shit but shit sells, that's all. Yokai Watch released in 2013 and makes every Pokemon game on the 3DS look like garbage. Is Game Freak punished for being incompetent? Never.

….instead of namecalling and focusing on a dispute, why don't you try contributing something to the thread?

Learn to participate in actual discussions where someone can point out the problems with a game without it being a personal attack on you.

Holy shit yes, this game.

It's impressive that it was a launch title. 60fps and smooth controls. Something many games these days can barely even think of achieving on consoles.

At being Doom, without a doubt.

yeah, im trying. communication with strangers using only text is hard.

Getting the most out of using the fewest resources.

The fewer clock cycles you use to do something, and the less memory needs to be shuffled around and managed, the better optimized it will be.

The end result is that something good looking like MGSV can run on a craptop, because it utilizes everything well. The lighting system isn't brute-forced like in most games for once, and you can see how simplistic the models are when used in SFM. On the other hand, some games barely even run on a high-end rig with two 1080s because they just cram everything in there with no consideration.

A big problem is how most games don't optimized for bandwidth. Loading a level? Hold on, let me jam 4 GBs worth of textures in. It's everything your graphics card can handle, and you just piledrive it in there. Game has to stutter when suddenly it needs to load all this junk and figure out what to swap out. A good developer would find a way to use fewer textures, find a way to compress them without losing quality, find a way to stream them as they're needed or before they are instead of just waiting for specific points, etc. Loading textures is just one area that often bottlenecks a game, but it's a common one.

There's a lot of different techniques to limit what actually needs to be passed to the GPU, too, like culling, which eliminates most stuff out of view of the camera. This seems basic, but it requires an extra step to prepare the scene before the GPU finalized everything. It's worth it, though, because it reduces wasted cycles.

Basically, you're trying to do as much as possible with as little necessary. Some developers just suck and they design hungry systems, expecting everyone to have a testing-tier system or just turn all their crap down, and they don't realize until it's time to ship that, oh wait, their game runs like junk and they never sorted out the major issues.

You can tell when an engine like the FOX Engine put in the work before the game was even developed to run properly on low-end systems with minimal sacrifices, and you can also tell when the developers just assumed they'd have time to fix it at the end.

Speaking of unoptimized software, pic related.

the problem with that thing was, he was exagerating, and not even using a accurate way of measuring the fps (just a shitty yt video that wasn't even measuring the FP), so it wasn't exactly legitimate.

This demo is 64kb.

We need to reign in those file sizes, 80gb is fucking nuts.

Thats because those shitheads don't compress audio anymore.

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The demoscene shows us just how shitty most game developers are. This demo is also 64kb.

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It's a terrible game, but a technical level it was pretty amazing with many neat tricks to make it look better than what it actually is.

Everything maxed out including goywork hair and all the other shit?
I find that awfully hard to believe, unless updates have really done wonders to performance.

How? How?
This is sheer fucking technomancy.

Assembly I imagine. It's the go-to method for tiny-ass programs.

Assembly is an important part of small demos, but for PC, it mostly just adds speed. Much more important is code/asset compression, procedurally generated assets, and (on modern PCs, as opposed to booter platforms like the C64) the hundreds of megabytes of libraries and APIs in your OS.

I'm going to quote and say >sheer pec-flexing cowboy code

No matter your opinion on their newer games, they are very well optimized.

It's all done in GPU shaders. People have actually made games that run exclusively on the GPU too they're just usually very simple (like a top down racing game).

Lost Planet 1&2 exist and require a much more powerful computer than what you could get when they released to run comfortably at a stable 60fps or better, Resident Evil 6 is also not that great optimization-wise compared to 5, REvelations or the remasters.

Crysis 3 is the most unoptimized shit ever. It looks pretty but it certainly isnt a step up from Crysis 1 or 2.

Nah Crysis 1 is the most unoptimized of the 3 by far.

It runs fine as soon as you turn off one option, I think it was post processing or something. Soon as you turn that on your framerate tanks and the game looks uglier.

Speaking of Crysis 1 its fucking annoying running it on 64-bit OS systems, especially since neither Crytek or EA even patched it and one fan did all the work for them.

No it doesn't, even with everything to low it dips under 60 regularly because the physics engine is fundamentally broken to shit.
I mean see that screenshot, that's with everything to low on a 4770k + 1070.

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Doesn't Crysis only utilize 2 cores, which is why the performance was always broadly similar to Crysis 2?

Yes?
Not to mention the guy still has worse framerate than I get for some reason

It does but it's unoptimized, you rarely ever see more than 50-60% utilization on the second core.

Most things released by Platinum aside occasional misteps like Bayo on PS3.

MGR ran really solid on PS3.
Nier: Automata runs absolutely great on PS4, go try the demo if you don't believe me.

They understand that making a game run at a good framerate is more important than making it pretty, especially since they make action games so the GAMEPLAY part is the most important and everything must work to push the GAMEPLAY aspect of their games.

I can't wait for this game to come out. My new rig is ready.
Hopefully 2017 with Automata, Bannerlord and the likes will be the greatest fucking year we'd have in a decade.

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Excellent looking game too. Love it or hate it, it's a real gem on a technical level. Monolith are good devs, but I wish they'd go back to their roots.

Don't know if you'll need all that much power if the PS4 can run it without problems, and it can. Then again it can run DOOM at 60fps and my PC can't despite running other games better than the PS4 can