1173
It's so expensive to upgrade... (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 180 points 4 months ago (29 children)

Only for terrible AAA games. Actual fun games I am fine.

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  • [–] 38 points 4 months ago (21 children)

    yeah.. just dont buy unreal engine 5 games and you are fine

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  • [–] 25 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    I have never hated an engine before UE5. But god it is just a steaming pile of unoptimized, bloated dogshit.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    The engine isn't bad itself. The problem is it has some really cool tools that are expensive to run, but developers just turn them all on instead of optimizing. See: ARC Raiders for how it should be done. It's UE5, but they aren't using Nanite or Lumen. UE5 can run very well. Game developers thinking the only thing that matters is having the most photorealistic games is what's causes the issue.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    I wish it was possible to disable lumen. I have a feeling that alone is whats robbing FPS, and that alone is why a lot of ue5 games have resolution scaling forced enabled and cant be turned off

    I bet things would look better, too.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    The developers can, or they can add a toggle. It isn't fundamental to UE5. ARC Raiders and Squad are both on UE5 and don't use Lumen.

    The issue is supporting Lumen and another lighting solution requires them to make sure both work. For multiplayer games especially, having both isn't an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people. Squad, for example, looked into it, but they ended up going with a different GI system that's more performant so everyone can (and must) use it.

    For single-player games, it's possible to have Lumen and another option. It's just extra cost to development. They'd rather go with the option that creates better trailers and not worry about people struggling to run it. They can run at an upscale 240p for all the executives care.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    For multiplayer games especially, having both isn't an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people.

    Not if the option is configurable. This is akin to how Rocket League has all kinds of stylistic options, but most pros disable them all. I'm sure that will hold true for their UE6 migration, too.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    No, I mean they can give you more information. Shadows can tell you where players are before you can see them, for example. You can also get information from reflections. Players who have hardware that can't support these features are disadvantaged. Lumen is not equivalent to, for example, texture resolution.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    UE 5.8 is supposed to include a "Lumen Lite" and some other improvements so that "games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps". That'll probably provide a big boost on other platforms, but I dunno if anyone will patch their existing games to the new version.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    These features are enabled by default in UE5, devs aren't going out of their way to enable them. Epic lies about them being beneficial to performance, which is only true if your assets are shit. Nanite is especially bad because Unreal Engine doesn't have a different approach for automatic LODs; you either need to do it all yourself or use nanite.

    Not to say that devs aren't to blame - they should know better - but they are just following Epic's recommendations and defaults.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    I'm getting like that for Unity games.

    No idea what it is but just about every unity game makes my CPU run hot and starts pumping 40 degrees C air into the room.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    What? Which ones? Escape from Tarkov is the most expensive Unity game to run that I know of, and it doesn't have this issue.

    The issues with UE5 aren't the base engine. It's Nanite and Lumen, and how easy they make them to just toggle on. Unity doesn't have any features like this. You can get things like them on the store, but they aren't baked in. They do have ECS, which is designed to have a ridiculous number of entities operating at once. I could see how that could cause this issue if unoptimized, but not many games are using it yet so it's not what you're talking about.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Raft, Software Inc, Tinberborn, Big Ambitions. None of those are heavy games, but all of them make cook my i7-9700K

    Guess when I launched Raft and it hit high 50 degrees and when I exited the game.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    High 50s isn't actually an issue for any modern CPU I know of

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Problem is it then pumps 40 degrees temps into the room which sucks when the temp is already in the 30s.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    That’s exactly what’s going to happen with any CPU with a TPD of 95W and 30+ degree ambient temps.

    Your CPU is actually running extremely cool if your temps are only hitting the 50s in that scenario.

    You need to fix the rooms airflow.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, that's almost certainly not because of Unity. At most, it could be blamed on C#, if we're blaming the technology. This is an issue with their simulation I would assume. For example, Timberborn is simulating liquids and a population of workers. The liquids are probably the biggest culprit, and there's a reason you don't see many games doing it.

    All the games you listed are simulation games though. They are going to be the largest CPU hogs you can get, especially when you use the highest simulation speed possible. At that point, they're usually literally maxing out your CPU and running it as fast as it can process. As another example of this, Paradox games can not reach their highest speeds on weaker systems or later into the games. They run as fast as the CPU can process, which means nearly 100% utilization. It's not because they aren't efficient. It's because you're telling it to go all out on processing.

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  • [–] 63 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Gamers who speedrun NES games briefly poke their head out of the cave, see that life is more than shadows on a cave wall, reject that reality and return to the task at hand.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Seriously, I barely play any new games, and pretty much no AAA that have come out the last few years. This year I've finished:

    • Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Conviction, and Blacklist
    • Super Mario World
    • Grim Dawn (co-op)
    • 999 (9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors)
    • Across the Obelisk (multiple times, wife and I play this co-op)
    • Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
    • Stella Glow
    • Ball x Pit
    • Rainbow Six Vegas 2
    • ChainStaff
    • 9 Years of Shadows
    • Ace Combat X
    • Live A Live remake

    And currently I'm playing Megacopter: Blades of the Goddess solo, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 with my wife.

    I'm having a blast tearing through the backlog this year, and I've barely bought any games compared to previous years. My Steam Deck alone has like 150+ games on it I'm looking to play through, and that doesn't even account for all the retro games I'm looking to play via emulation.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I always have a really powerful modern specs PC, but since I try to pick games that maximize fun and don’t try to squeeze 50hrs out of a 20hr game like AAA titles, I pretty much never challenge my system.

    For some reason everything stresses when I sit on the steam window, though. Maybe a quirk of linux?

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    • [–] 112 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    Don't worry, maybe china will flood the market with cheap ram soon or something.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    In 3-4 years.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Most likely not. They are using it for their own datacenters.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    At the moment - for sure. When they scale production (could be more than 5 years) they may be able to exceed the dc demand. Chinese manufacturing of anything is running on much lower margins than others. They don't play the limit-supply-to-increase-margins game. I think it's a CCP policy, as it's a harmful practice for the rest of the economy. So if they scale chip manufacturing to the point where it exceeds dc demand, they won't stop scaling because their margins won't fall. They'll scale further to increase profits by making and selling into other markets - consumer, etc. including abroad. I think the limiting factors to this future are the mass producrion of high quality lithography machines in China as well as the availability of high performance CPU and GPU designs. They're moving to solve all of those though, now faster than ever with the embargo on US tech.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't that what this is? Some trade war with China?

    Kinda what happened to Japan?

    I don't know

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    • [–] 111 points 4 months ago* (15 children)

    "Good" news is that AI companies killed the gaming upgrade market, so studios will need to target the same hardware for a while. We might even see the come back of the smart tricks to go beyond the hardware limits era.

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  • [–] 74 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    They're prob going to try to push cloud hardware for everything. GeForce now, Windows 12? Online subscription!

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  • [–] 24 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    They seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that internet infrastructure in the US* is horrible and a lot of people outside of major urban areas have shitternet that makes streaming games laggy and unreliable. Unless they spend serious money upgrading infrastructure, it's just going to be Stadia 2.0. Except even then people still really do not like gaming as a service so it'll probably fail again anyway.

    *I don't know how good other countries' internet is but I would include them if I did.

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago*

    My internet is fine, good bandwith, good latency. But even then cloud gaming introduces delays i am a) not accostumed to and b) not tolerant of.

    I do not want to have 100ms delay between my action and seeing the reaction. I do not want to be dependent on perfect connectivity to achieve even this delay, making every small issue which would only annoy me while browsing make my gaming hell. Even Bluetooth for my controller is too much delay for me when playing stuff like Dead Cells - it's either a dedicated receiver or cable-bound. Everyone who actually wants to play something fast paced can't be happy with cloud gaming. Well, the turn based strategy crowd might be tolerant of that, but i will never be until my body is too broken to play anything faster than solitaire.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    Cloud? With what hardware? Everything is overpriced because of AI, no one is spared

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    Because they are mainly producing components for datacenters, which will be used for cloud computing. Only consumergrade hardware is overpriced.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    Only consumergrade hardware is overpriced

    Well no, the memory price increase is specifically here to price gouge AI datacenters. If you're running a non-AI datacenter, and if you're targeting consumers, like with remote desktop gaming, you have AI-like costs (literally, since servers GPUs are gaming GPUs), but without the enterprise customers. Oh and you also need the best bandwidth possible, because a few added milliseconds might make the "remote" use unbearable, which is an added cost datacenters don't have to deal with on the same terms.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    That is prety irrelevant since consumers aren't the customers for AI datacenter hardware, rich megacorporations with unlimited VC capital are.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    Well yes, megacorps have unlimited budget for AI datacenters, that's my point; consumer facing offerings don't, such as cloud gaming, and they're competing for the same price-gouged resource ("competing" is too generous tbh, consumer facing companies are getting curb stomped)

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  • [–] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    the gaming upgrade market was kinda ridiculous anyway.

    We dont need new, more powerful GPUs every 12/16 months

    GPUs should, like, a new GPU every 5 years at a bare minium. New Cards being churned out every year is why gaming is shit, because theres no time for devs to learn, to optimize..instead they just target apis and get it out, and tell us use DLSS/FSR3 if performance is shit, even at 1080p there are still games they expect us to use stupid ass scaling to make playable.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    APIs are... how you tell the GPU to do things. Nobody's doing low level hardware access like it's 1990 and you're running MS-DOS.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    Yeah. Console optimization used to be a real thing they should bring to PCs. Tomb Raider 2013 and Battlefield 3/4 on the Xbox 360 managed visuals and performance that an equivalently-speced PC from 2005 wouldn't have been anywhere close to handling.

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    • [–] 52 points 4 months ago

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    [–] 51 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    As a kid I used to basically only play emulator games because I didn't have money for a real gpu. As an adult I basically only play indie games cause AAA games are all soulless trash.

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  • [–] [S] 25 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I reached my limit years ago for games that spend a bazillion $ on graphics, but their gameplay is just running from cutscene to cutscene with barely engaging combat in between.

    Indie games tend to be actually fun.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Fr. I was playing corekeeper with a friend and randomly found a really pretty oasis mini biome, it had no 'use' but it was a chill safe area I found by accident, you could tell the devs just wanted you to enjoy their game. It feels so nice to play something that isnt trying to milk you for money at every corner!

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    How can AAA games all be soulless if they’re all Soulslikes?

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    • [–] 48 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Time to catch up on some older games you missed. More fun for less money.

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    • [–] 46 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Any company making games where they're pushing graphics into top graphics card territory for no good gameplay reason can go straight to hell in 2026.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    That seems to be the default for Unreal Engine 5.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    That's my feelings after seeing Expedition 33 on UE5.

    The game was absolutely phenomenal, but there is ABSOLUTELY no reason that that game should've forced me to upgrade my graphics card just to throw extraneous particle effect bullshit over every location that can't even be turned off. It's beyond ridiculous.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    It's gonna bite them in the ass shortly. $70 games that costs $200+ MM to make and despite selling millions of copies don't even break even. If the minimum graphical requirements break the floor of what the average PC gamer owns, sales will plummet and kill the AAAA and AAA product line.

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    • [–] 79 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    6u8reo-3270202027

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  • [–] [S] 30 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    By the end of this summer, it'll be a full year on Linux for me. It's giving my old hardware some more life, and I have no reason to go back.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    linux is good but it’s not magic either… it’ll help a 50-55 fps game run at 60 fps, but the game that crawls on windows won’t fare that much better on linux unfortunately

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    It depends. On linux i have 10+ year old laptop pc running indi games while playing youtube videos on a second window, all while keeping the temps below 70°. The same pc fans scream murder by simply open a browser in Win 10.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    There's of course a ton of variables at play here, and I'm gonna preface this by saying I'm by no means a graphics/performance snob and I'm mostly playing older games.

    But anecdotally, there have been some cases where Linux has been a night and day difference for me.

    My computer is basically 12+ years old, it's basically the same computer my wife built before we started dating crammed into a new box with a couple upgrades along the way. It has a pre-ryzen AMD processor, and a 2060, so it's definitely not technically meeting required specs for a lot of games but it's holding it's own and chugging along managing to run most of what I try to throw at it on (what I think are) acceptable settings.

    I got Helldivers 2 to run on it exactly once on windows, every time after that it crashed on the loading screen when I tried to join a game no matter how I tried to get it running.

    Since switching to Linux it's been playable. Not necessarily the smoothest experience, but certainly good enough for my needs.

    That's probably the newest game I've tried to run, I'm cheap and tend to wait a couple years to get games on sale. All the older games I've tried to run so far have pretty much run the same as on windows as far as I can tell.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Linux gave extra life to so many computers. I still have a core 2 duo running Void.

    Sadly, I can only open two tabs on Firefox. But it is great. For some games thought, I can only run stuff on hardware that came after 2012.

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    • [–] 31 points 4 months ago

    I'll be DEAD and BURIED before I play PC games that require a 1000W PSU-powered graphics card.

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    [–] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Huh? Retro GPUs are like the 8800, right? The 1080ti is still pretty new, right?!

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    • [–] 21 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    This Steam Next Fest killed Unreal Engine for me.

    Every single game with that splash screen ended up as a slide show, and not even prettier, I play 15 years old games that look better than most games I saw coming from UE5.

    I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.

    No need to upgrade, just give a chance to other games, devs and engines that cares for their customers.

    I got into Cassette Beasts a while ago and notice all Godot games run well on Steam Deck and my older hardware. Cry Engine looks beautiful and still run well on stuff.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    Kingdom Come Deliverance II was made on Cry Engine, day one it run pretty good on my setup (Ryzen 7 5700 X + RTX 2060 at the time, i got more or less 45 - 60 FPS on medium high settings, didn't remember if i disabled upscaling).

    Meanwhile The Outer Worlds 2 with way less realistic and impressive graphics was a messy pixelated slideshow once i finished the tutorial, i was running on everything on minimum.

    Cry Engine and REngine are a memento from a time where videogame companies used to squish every bit for performance and make games look and feel fantastic even in weak hardware

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.

    Real time global illumination (Lumen) and runtime LOD generation (Nanite) can't be made much faster; it's not really about optimization, it's that these features are fundamentally slow. The problem is that Epic spent a shit-ton of R&D developing these, and they do save developers some time - at the expense of disk space and performance.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    In UE5 my hobby project ran fine on my rig but I stopped and spent a year making a system that reduced the game's footprint 3 fold.

    If I was working for a company then they wouldn't allow me to waste time doing that.

    I blame Crysis for that.

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    • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Most of the actually good games don't need strong hardware.

    :blobcat_yaranaika: 1
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    • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Nowadays, if it doesn't run on my Steam Deck I'm not playing it 🤷🏼 too many games to play still anyways...

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    I'm so glad to have picked up a Steam Deck when I did. The cheapest one they sell right now is $789

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