I’ve only been a PC gamer for a few years, yet it’s given me great and terrible experiences. I started getting into it during a lockdown and never really looked back. I fully understand why it’s not for some people, but I’ve come to love the many options and changes I can make to alter my gaming experience.
I started with an old office computer, added an SSD and a GPU for a relatively low cost, and I was PC gaming. I remember playing Wreckfest at 60fps, and the difference from my Xbox One X was unbelievable. Yes, I was playing at a lower resolution, but the jump from 30 to 60 fps was a game-changer. A few years later, I have a mid to high-end rig that should be capable of playing any game you want at almost max settings….or at least so I thought.
PC gaming is in a strange state just now, with way too many games releasing with issues. I don’t play every game at release; way too much to try and do that, but thanks to things like Game Pass and other subscription services, I do manage to try a good few games at least. In the last year, I can count on one hand the amount of issue-free games I’ve been able to play.
Plague Tale Requiem
This game worked from start to finish with no issues for me, and it never once crashed. This was on ultra settings at 1440p, and I only had a few drops in FPS below 60. For a game that launched on PS5 and XSX at 1440p and 30, I was happy enough with how the game played and looked (considering my higher-priced PC parts). Unfortunately, other than that, PC ports have been disappointing at times, with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (suffering from terrible FPS stutter and drops) and The Last Of Us (again, FPS drops and some of the worst crashes I’ve ever seen) being in my recent memory.
I understand that optimising for PC is much more complicated than consoles; this is making a game work on fixed hardware vs an almost never-ending list of pc CPUs, GPUs and Ram configurations. However, the games continue to release, and then apologies follow. Developers then announce that their games differ from the vision they had hoped for. It shouldn’t be this way; games should be released when they are ready.
People might ask, “Why game on PC then?”
Even on games that work poorly at launch (most are fixed quickly enough, by the way), the highs are higher, and the ability to run at over 60 fps remains one of the most important features to me as a gamer. It’s not about how it looks; it’s about how a game feels that makes me want to play it, and 60fps or more is extremely important to me.
It doesn’t need to be this way, though, and I have a shining example of why, Cyberpunk 2077.
This game launched so poorly that the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the games nearly ruined developers CD Projekt Red’s name in the gaming world. The PS5 and Xbox Series S and X versions of the game were better but not without issues, and PC was praised as the best way to play the game. Although it requires the biggest and best PC hardware, Cyberpunk 2077 on PC furthermore features Full ray tracing, which accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It’s incredible to look at and something the PS5 and XSX can only dream of recreating. However, It’s also unlikely to feature in many games for years, thanks to the insane requirements to get it working.
Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t alone, though; there are plenty of other great examples of PC ports of console games, such as God Of War, Death Stranding, RDR2 and Forza Horizon 5. I’ve played all those games at better resolutions and framerates than any console can produce.
Another point is that we are also currently experiencing games targeting higher fidelity and scope than we have for years; this will only leap forward as we fully step away from the previous generations of consoles (PS4 and Xbox One). With that, we will also see ageing PC hardware start to struggle, which has been clearly seen in much more recent games’ recommended requirements. Those trusty 1060s and 2060s will begin to struggle soon as games look to make another big step forward.
One of the reasons older GPUs will start to struggle is VRAM usage in modern games. As texture quality increases, this is advancing at an alarming rate. I recently upgraded from a card with 8GB VRAM to a card with 20GB VRAM. I did that cause I had seen the writing on the wall with how games were running, but I didn’t think the 20GB limits would be tickled by (more than a few) games after six months of use.
However, there are a couple of things that we are seeing happening in way too many games for PC, shader compilation stutter, poor optimisation and (don’t shoot the messenger on this one) games releasing earlier than they should. The first two issues have many points; games are most likely aimed at consoles first, and PC tweaks are applied later.
Shader compilation can mostly be fixed by having a game compile asynchronously in the background on the CPU; a recent example is Atomic Heart which ran exceptionally well on my PC. But it only sometimes works well. The Last Of Us featured a broken compilation that took far too long to complete but still saw the game suffer during gameplay, leaving me to wonder why I had waited so long for it complete in the first place.
In terms of optimisation, I’m using this to cover a broad section of game development. Take this as a lack of quality assurance, poor testing on a limited selection of hardware or failure to utilise the available PC hardware. Again as I mentioned earlier, this will be difficult with the vast differences in hardware owned by PC gamers. Still, good performance should be available to many gamers if the correct time and care is taken.
I played Star Wars Jedi: Survivor recently and loved the game; however, I didn’t love the inconsistency of the game’s performance. At 100% GPU usage, the gameplay was extremely performant. Then during sections of the game, I would watch it drop down to 60% or lower while seeing my performance drop at a similar rate. The game shouldn’t work this way, and although a patch improved it slightly, the game is still another couple short of being where it should be.
That leads nicely to my last point: if games aren’t ready to release, delay them. I don’t know any gamer who can say they have no backlog. The number of great games released in the last ten years is unbelievable, and the time and money required to have played everything is almost impossible. I understand that not everyone wants to play the same games, but there are plenty of options to keep most of us busy, and I’d be happy to wait an additional 3 or 6 months if a game came to PC in a good state.
Any delay would be far better than a game launching with issues and ruining my experience. Having just tried The Last Of Us and Jedi Survivor after a patch or two, they have both improved since their launch state. Nevertheless, the negative media coverage both games received will have made players stay away, which is a shame for two exceptional games when they are at their best.
Hopefully, PC gaming will improve shortly; it wasn’t long ago that PC was nearly always the optimal platform to play on. Yet, currently, I advise you to stick to your backlog and give new releases the time they need to become their best selves.
-BigGP
