What makes a game "unoptimized"

[DrPepper]

Added a few to the list so far. Feel free to disagree

 

[Mussels]

I don't understand why everyone bitches about crysis. I played the game using a E2180 + 8500GT medium/high settings 1440x900 no problems whatsoever. Only reason i can see someone not being able to run crysis is if they have a sub 2ghz processor and/or sub 7500GT

the problem is that you add a more powerful system than yours... and it just doesnt run any faster. an upgrade that would get you 20 FPS in any other game, gets you 2 FPS in crysis.

Cod4 is also a good, optimised game. It looks good, clean, pleasant graphics - and you can get 60FPS of a radeon x1600, which is antique these days

 

[MilkyWay]

stalker was really bad at the start bugs and lag for no reason

yeah cod 4 runs good and looks good on low end hardware, steam games scale well too they dont need a lot of hardware to run

i think empires total war is more of a hardware issue it takes a lot of power to render those armies and graphics for each unit and the enviroment

 

[farlex85]

the problem is that you add a more powerful system than yours... and it just doesnt run any faster.

Yeah I think the thing w/ Crysis is there are always spots where it will bog down no matter how powerful your system and sometimes regardless of settings. It's uneven as you said before. Someone w/ an 8500gt is used to playing games w/o terribly high performance. Someone w/ top end hardware expects a different level of performance due to the way other games perform. Crysis just doesn't deliver on this front.

 

[MilkyWay]

please add saints row 2 because it looks the same as the xbox 360 version but is not as fast
please add resident evil 4 it is a horrible pc port

 

[DrPepper]

stalker was really bad at the start bugs and lag for no reason

yeah cod 4 runs good and looks good on low end hardware, steam games scale well too they dont need a lot of hardware to run

i think empires total war is more of a hardware issue it takes a lot of power to render those armies and graphics for each unit and the enviroment

E:TW runs fine at max settings but it crashes on the campaign map all the time. Also crashes when you alt tab sometimes and if you leave it on a battle too long (paused) it crashes.

 

[v12dock]

stalker was really bad at the start bugs and lag for no reason

yeah cod 4 runs good and looks good on low end hardware, steam games scale well too they dont need a lot of hardware to run

i think empires total war is more of a hardware issue it takes a lot of power to render those armies and graphics for each unit and the enviroment

Your right now that I look at it steam games do run great minus GTA4 but, HL2, L4D, COD4

 

[MilkyWay]

enemy territory runs horrible at times on campaign at at release it was bad on my 8800gt

yeah i mean games made by valve allways run good like counter strike source, team fortress 2 and left 4 dead

 

[DrPepper]

enemy territory runs horrible at times on campaign at at release it was bad on my 8800gt

yeah i mean games made by valve allways run good like counter strike source, team fortress 2 and left 4 dead

Enemy territory ran fine with me on my 8800GT. I can't add saints row because I'm not sure of whats actually wrong with it. I wouldn't mind some proof of somesort.

 

[MilkyWay]

I dont know if it was patched later but it ran bad for me, saints row 2 is not as good as the console versions

"That's not say that Saints Row 2 always looks bad, in fact, more often than not it looks good (shoot the four-car train with a rocket to see what I mean), it's just a bummer that as soon as the game is put in motion on the PC things turn to utter crap."

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/941/941952p3.html

the whole review explains it

EDIT: im more of a joystiq reader than IGN

 

[pantherx12]

Neverwinter Nights 2.

if I have all settings to high on 1400x900 I get 3 fps !

even at 1024x800 it runs at avg of 20 fps.(settings on medium)

 

[Lillebror]

Why call it unoptimised? Thats just so wrong in so many ways! If its unoptimized, it would just run crappy and slow, not buggy. To optimize, you edit your code to make it run faster, not fix bugs in it.
Crysis and gta4 is not unoptimized, they just got to much content for this generation hardware to utilize.

 

[DrPepper]

Why call it unoptimised? Thats just so wrong in so many ways! If its unoptimized, it would just run crappy and slow, not buggy. To optimize, you edit your code to make it run faster, not fix bugs in it.

I just called it that so other people can relate to it. I know the difference but others often don't. That's why I said in another post I'd prefer to call them broke instead of unoptimised.

 

[Mussels]

Why call it unoptimised? Thats just so wrong in so many ways! If its unoptimized, it would just run crappy and slow, not buggy. To optimize, you edit your code to make it run faster, not fix bugs in it.
Crysis and gta4 is not unoptimized, they just got to much content for this generation hardware to utilize.

crysis is unoptimised, because as you increase the hardware power, the games performance doesnt increase with it. you double the power available, and the game will give you 20% higher FPS. THATS where the unoptimised comes in.

I saw the edits to teh first post, please... buggy and unoptimized aren't the same thing.

 

[MilkyWay]

buggy and unoptimised are probly similar but different

unoptimised means it cant run on current hardware properly, it wont run good when it should

 

[Mussels]

unoptimised means it cant run on current hardware properly, it wont run good when it should

a good summary!

Fallout 3: for some people it crashes with certain soundcards/audio codecs (K-lite packs FFDshow screws with it, and some EAX emulators do), but once you get it working and meet the minimum requirements, its all good news. It ran sweet for me on an 8800GT, and on 4870 crossfire i jsut get to crank the distance sliders and AA up a bit further

demanding? yes, on high settings. Unoptimised? no, because you can adjust settings to cover a very large range of hardware combinations (lots of settings to adjust, to lower either CPU, GPU, or memory requirements)

P.S - good thread. getting lots of posts and feedback here.

 

[WhiteNoise]

All the games I have run on my currect PC but some should run a hell of a lot better than they do...Poorly optimized games that I have:

EverQuest 2
Armed Assault
Crysis

Thats all I can think of tbh. Fallout 3 runs awesome on my PC and so does just abouth everything else. I've never experienced any audio issues with FO3 either.

 

[Mussels]

All the games I have run on my currect PC but some should run a hell of a lot better than they do...Poorly optimized games that I have:

EverQuest 2
Armed Assault
Crysis

Thats all I can think of tbh. Fallout 3 runs awesome on my PC and so does just abouth everything else. I've never experienced any audio issues with FO3 either.

on my auzentech with the latest drivers, they added an "EAX" button to add EAX support to vista. if i tick that box, FO3 wont load. If i untick that box, it loads and works fine.

Its a perfect example of a bug that does not effect performance.

 

[DrPepper]

All the games I have run on my currect PC but some should run a hell of a lot better than they do...Poorly optimized games that I have:

EverQuest 2
Armed Assault
Crysis

Thats all I can think of tbh. Fallout 3 runs awesome on my PC and so does just abouth everything else. I've never experienced any audio issues with FO3 either.

Armed assault lags badly because it has a very high quality AF. It gets even more demanding the higher the view distance which can be about 10'000 feet I believe. Also the physics are crazy as well.

 

[WhiteNoise]

I don't really have any performance issues with Armed Assault. I play the game maxed out including view distance and it runs very good. My problem with AA is I have to run it in windowed mode or it doesn't work.

 

[crtecha]

Right now Crysis is on my last nerve although im still trying to figure out the flickering sky issue. Im going to try g_multigpu = 1 tonight to see if it helps. I also heard that only 1 cf bridge will fix it too. Kinda sounds like a load to me but Ill try anything. All other games that I play I have no issues with left4dead,portal,quake III. I havent installed any of my more labor intense games but thus far crysis is being a total bitch

 

[DrPepper]

Can't get cryostasis to go to 1920 x 1080. It locksup.

I think armed assualt should go on that list because it still has random crashes or at least random to me they obviously have some logic causing the crash.

 

[ArmoredCavalry]

Like you have already mentioned, Empire Total War is buggy/crashes.

For me I also have strange graphical glitches, that I do not get in any other games (weird shadows on the troops).

Another game that sticks out in my mind is Mercenaries 2. For the one day I played it, I couldn't help thinking how much it felt like a Beta.

I think the problem is, game companies want to put so much content into the game, but then set deadlines that are not realistic. This is why I hope that Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 will be amazing, because Blizzard just says, "it is ready when it is ready".

Current examples of "well done/finished feel" games in my mind are H.A.W.X., and Demigod. However, both these have way less content than say, Empire Total War (at least imo).

 

[imperialreign]

stalker was really bad at the start bugs and lag for no reason

IDK about all that - the STALKER community has been able to nail down what causes the majority of lag with the vanilla SoC game . . . and given what the game engine is trying to handle, the amount of stuttering/lag inflicted on a system is generally the same no matter what the hardware - beefier/OCed systems aren't as afflicted. It's not so much that the game isn't optimised . . . the engine is just trying to handle more than it should.


Clear Sky, though, definitely fits into the rank of unoptimised - the performance hits' are sporadic, entierelly dependant upon your hardware, and what DirectX render you're trying to run (e.g. DX8, DX10, DX10.1 run better than DX9). The game still does not make proper use of multi-core systems, quad cores are the most affected by this issue. Even with the latest patch, it's not unusual for quad core systems to only be running 50% load on only two cores.

 

[MatTheCat]

An old one here that really gets my goat just how utterly pathetically it runs:

Gothic 2. With all settings turned up on my present rig, In out door areas I get around 17-25 FPS. This is a 7-8 year old game we are talking about here!

Gothic 3 (But at least it runs a hell of a lot better (on my rig) than its predecessor....not even nearly as good a game though)

STALKER SoC. Not so much Frame Rate Drop as Microstutter that gives impression of 10FPS whenever around Fire.......Sound is also buggy as hell.

The Witcher... Considering that the graphics are not even that great (although definitely very pretty), I fail to see why this game increasingly lags and stutters around the way it does on my rig when you get towards the later levels.