Isn't Mass Effect 3 a good example of optimized PC Game?

[Vendor]

I just played this game in hd even with frap at 1280x720 res. i was getting about 21-25 fps and no real lag but when i compared this to LA Noire with average graphics. It just make the developers look unprofessional, isn't it?
I played it for 3 hrs, the gameplay is very nice, although i had this game since the release but didn't played as i was busy in other things.
But i would like to know how come Rockstar and most of the brands make such poorly coded games whereas a few are well optimized?

 

[BumbleBee]

I just played this game in hd even with frap at 1280x720 res. i was getting about 21-25 fps and no real lag but when i compared this to LA Noire with average graphics. It just make the developers look unprofessional, isn't it?
I played it for 3 hrs, the gameplay is very nice, although i had this game since the release but didn't played as i was busy in other things.
But i would like to know how come Rockstar and most of the brands make such poorly coded games whereas a few are well optimized?

time and money.

 

[AsRock]

I just played this game in hd even with frap at 1280x720 res. i was getting about 21-25 fps and no real lag but when i compared this to LA Noire with average graphics. It just make the developers look unprofessional, isn't it?
I played it for 3 hrs, the gameplay is very nice, although i had this game since the release but didn't played as i was busy in other things.
But i would like to know how come Rockstar and most of the brands make such poorly coded games whereas a few are well optimized?

Rockstar like adding more of what others don't really add or much of Physics. And their is what bumblebee said..

Lag ? well did they nor update the game for more to PC standard ? and your running a 8400 lolz. Which on the PS3 it lagged a tiny bit.

EDIT: With playing it on the PS3 already not tried the PC version which i will one day when it's cheap enough just for the heck of it so it might be just crappy or it could be that 8400 you say you have.

Mass Effect optimized ?. haha if you want a optimized game it's called Skyrim or even Metro.

 

[Vendor]

actually, i also have la noire on my ps3.. but it wasn't my fault to get it add up on my build. It was due to stupid assembler who couldn't understand what is Gaming rig.

 

[D4S4]

db.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I just played this game in hd even with frap at 1280x720 res. i was getting about 21-25 fps and no real lag but when i compared this to LA Noire with average graphics. It just make the developers look unprofessional, isn't it?
I played it for 3 hrs, the gameplay is very nice, although i had this game since the release but didn't played as i was busy in other things.
But i would like to know how come Rockstar and most of the brands make such poorly coded games whereas a few are well optimized?

It's designed for slow-ass consoles. It is not optimized at all--it's hardware requirements are simply low:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/01/19/m...s-released-render-reaper-invasion-on-2gb-ram/

Unlike EA, Rockstar likes to upgrade the game to make use of the hardware resources in computers. For example, Rockstar consistently makes high resolution textures available for graphics cards with a lot of VRAM.

 

[newtekie1]

Unlike EA, Rockstar likes to upgrade the game to make use of the hardware resources in computers. For example, Rockstar consistently makes high resolution textures available for graphics cards with a lot of VRAM.

Indeed, people tend to call any game that doesn't max out on a mid-range rig unoptimized.

GTA:IV is a great example. When Rockstar released the PC version they unlocked the engine to the max, and at max settings it looked awesome but ran like crap. Everyone bitched, but when the game was run at reasonable settings it still looked better than anything else available, and ran great. All rockstar would have had to do to "optimize" the game was lower what the maximum settings were for the engine, but they didn't want to do that, they wanted the game to be wide open and really show off what the engine was capable of.

 

[Frizz]

I just played this game in hd even with frap at 1280x720 res. i was getting about 21-25 fps and no real lag but when i compared this to LA Noire with average graphics. It just make the developers look unprofessional, isn't it?
I played it for 3 hrs, the gameplay is very nice, although i had this game since the release but didn't played as i was busy in other things.
But i would like to know how come Rockstar and most of the brands make such poorly coded games whereas a few are well optimized?

You can't compare ME3 to an open sandbox game like GTA IV on PC as Mass Effect 3 is a linear staged game and originally was made for PC anyway. GTA was just a good example for how lazily console games are ported onto PC, either way getting good hardware will alleviate those problems.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Mass Effect was made for Windows and ported to console. Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 were made for consoles and ported to Windows. Enivronments were quite large and detailed on Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2, they got smaller but more detailed and even smaller and more detailed on Mass Effect 3. If consoles were out the equation, environments would have stayed large, perhaps getting larger, and detail would increase due to how cheap RAM has gotten (average system had 1-2 GiB back in 2007 and today that's moved to 4-8 GiB). That didn't happen because the amount of RAM consoles have hasn't changed. EA demands better graphics of Bioware so Bioware's only solution was to cut environment size.

Take, for example, SSV Normandy, there was no load screens when changing decks. The entire ship was likely loaded into memory the entire time the player is on it. SR-2, every floor is effectively an entirely different map.

 

[newtekie1]

You can't compare ME3 to an open sandbox game like GTA IV on PC as Mass Effect 3 is a linear staged game and originally was made for PC anyway. GTA was just a good example for how lazily console games are ported onto PC, either way getting good hardware will alleviate those problems.

Actually, GTA:IV was an example of a lot of work going into porting to the PC, and how a port should be done. Allowing huge ranges of settings to adjust how the game runs, while allowing such massive settings way beyond what consoles or most other PC games allowed at the time.

People judge games like GTA:IV or Crysis because on max settings they push hardware, but the fact is that they run extremely well on huge ranges of hardware, all the way down to low end hardware and look good on low end hardware at the same time, and that is the true sign of an optimized game. A lazy port is the ones that just essentially transfer the console settings for the engine over to the PC, or just give BS settings like "Low/Medium/High" for graphics and don't allow any tuning. That isn't optimization, but it will give the result you are looking for, a game that runs smoothly on "max" settings, and people would praise these types of games as being optimized all the time.

 

[BumbleBee]

Rockstar doesn't give a sh*t about the PC. Midnight Club, Bully, Manhunt, LA Noire, all the 3D Grand Theft Auto games are console ports.

 

[Easo]

Unreal Engine 3 is optimised by default, if I am allowed to say that.
Plus, lack of HD textures (DAMN THE SHEPARDS JACKET AT THE START OF GAME WTF IS THAT S...!!!) and spectacular effects helps with this. Still looks good enough.
P.S.
Dont get me started on endings though. xD

 

[mastrdrver]

Actually, GTA:IV was an example of a lot of work going into porting to the PC, and how a port should be done. Allowing huge ranges of settings to adjust how the game runs, while allowing such massive settings way beyond what consoles or most other PC games allowed at the time.

I'm just going to cut this out and ask did you actually get the game when it came out?

Optimized is not what I or anyone else would call it. The reason everyone bitched was because the game ran the same whether on a 4670 or a GTX 285. What made the difference was the number of cores you had. Since consoles lack the GPU horsepower that we had in the PC at the time, most of the physics and open environment stuff was rendered on the CPU. The PS3 cell architecture, for example, can handle something like 6 to 8 threads. This was about a month or two after Nehalem came out. I moved from a C2Q at 3.2Ghz to my i7 920 and even the 920 at stock clocks kicked my overclocked Q9400 to the curb and laughed at it. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I literally doubled my frame rate with that one simple upgrade. It was at ~25-30 with the Q9400, the i7 920 was ~50. New or old OS did not matter.

GTA IV was anything but optimized and a perfect example of the crap we get from the consoles when the publisher puts zero effort in to it. Even now it is unoptimized though a lot better then it was. It's a matter of what the game engine is designed for. GTA IV is designed to use a lot of CPU resources to make up for the GPU weakness in the consoles. They just rewrote the code to work on x86, end of story. There's not any real optimization any developer can do short of rewriting the engine to make use of more GPU resources instead of leaving them all on the CPU.

 

[newtekie1]

I'm just going to cut this out and ask did you actually get the game when it came out?

Optimized is not what I or anyone else would call it. The reason everyone bitched was because the game ran the same whether on a 4670 or a GTX 285. What made the difference was the number of cores you had. Since consoles lack the GPU horsepower that we had in the PC at the time, most of the physics and open environment stuff was rendered on the CPU. The PS3 cell architecture, for example, can handle something like 6 to 8 threads. This was about a month or two after Nehalem came out. I moved from a C2Q at 3.2Ghz to my i7 920 and even the 920 at stock clocks kicked my overclocked Q9400 to the curb and laughed at it. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I literally doubled my frame rate with that one simple upgrade. It was at ~25-30 with the Q9400, the i7 920 was ~50. New or old OS did not matter.

GTA IV was anything but optimized and a perfect example of the crap we get from the consoles when the publisher puts zero effort in to it.

Yes, I bought it the day it came out, and oddly enough I had an HD4670 and a GTX285 at the time. It most certainly did not play the same on the two, 1080p was unplayable on the HD4670, as was most of the other advanced graphics settings, but it still did look better than the console version. To turn the settings up or run at 1080p I had to use the GTX285. And the HD4670 machine had a Athlon X2 in it, and it ran fine with more detail than the console. Of course GTA needs CPU horse power, when you max it out there is a shit load of stuff going on that the CPU has to manage. AI for every pedestrian, physics for every vehicle, and there are a shitton of them when you up the settings.

And the biggest CPU load was caused by the Clip Capture feature, which basically recorded all your gameplay, so essentially the equivalent of FRAPS running constantly while playing the game. A feature the console versions obviously didn't even think of having. Once that feature is turned off, the CPU becomes a lot less important. No one talks about that though...

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Remember, Xbox 360 ran GTA4 at 720p and PS3 ran GTA4 at 630p. Neither console could handle 1080p.

 

[mastrdrver]

The game didn't even run 1080p textures. It scaled up a lower resolution texture for the high resolutions that the PC could run.

Yes, I bought it the day it came out, and oddly enough I had an HD4670 and a GTX285 at the time. It most certainly did not play the same on the two, 1080p was unplayable on the HD4670, as was most of the other advanced graphics settings, but it still did look better than the console version. To turn the settings up or run at 1080p I had to use the GTX285. And the HD4670 machine had a Athlon X2 in it, and it ran fine with more detail than the console. Of course GTA needs CPU horse power, when you max it out there is a shit load of stuff going on that the CPU has to manage. AI for every pedestrian, physics for every vehicle, and there are a shitton of them when you up the settings.

Did you have another CPU other then the Athlon X2?

Yes the CPU takes care of the AI, but if you turn down the draw distance and detail then also turn down the demand on the CPU, not the GPU like it should be. Even AMD disables anything more then 2 GPUs since the game demands so much out of the CPU already (that's their statement not mine). nVidia does not and it shows as scaling stops at 2 GPUs and gets worse the more you add.

 

[zootac]

Rockstar and most of the brands make such poorly coded games

+1

 

[newtekie1]

Did you have another CPU other then the Athlon X2?

Yes the CPU takes care of the AI, but if you turn down the draw distance and detail then also turn down the demand on the CPU, not the GPU like it should be. Even AMD disables anything more then 2 GPUs since the game demands so much out of the CPU already (that's their statement not mine). nVidia does not and it shows as scaling stops at 2 GPUs and gets worse the more you add.

Most definitely, my main rig with the GTX285 was either a Q6600 or a X3370(Q9650), I can't remember which it was at the time.

Yes, turning down the draw distance lowers the number of AI objects the CPU has to control. It isn't a hard concept to understand. Turning down the detail most definitely affected the GPU, not the CPU. The draw distance affected CPU because of the number of AI objects the CPU is controlling.

Here is a shocker, they actually coded the game to us multiple cores very well. Lets see some of those other "optimized" games do that. Oh, and they managed to simulate several city block worth of people and vehicles around the player at all times, in real time. What other games have you seen manage that with lower CPU load? Hell what other games have you seen manage that at all? Oh, and of those, which also have the gameplay being recorded constantly in the background with a FRAPS like style?

 

[mastrdrver]

Again I just return to my statement that AMD made that the game is more CPU demanding then GPU demanding to the point that they disabled more then 2 GPUs.

If the draw distance and detail effected the GPU so much, then why does the GPU memory usage not move with those two settings?

I see BF3 on the opposite side of what GTA IV was, though they are far from the same but I think close enough to be similar to compare to.

 

[newtekie1]

Again I just return to my statement that AMD made that the game is more CPU demanding then GPU demanding to the point that they disabled more then 2 GPUs.

If the draw distance and detail effected the GPU so much, then why does the GPU memory usage not move with those two settings?

I see BF3 on the opposite side of what GTA IV was, though they are far from the same but I think close enough to be similar to compare to.

I'll restate, draw distance affects the CPU because of the number of AI objects the CPU has to control in that distance. It has an affect on GPU, but the affect on CPU is much larger, making the GPU difference unimportant.

Why don't the affect GPU memory? Because there aren't any more textures being loaded into memory with either of those settings. The textures are already loaded into the memory, the only thing that is changing is polygon count and number of AI objects, which have no real affect on amount of GPU memory.

However, turning down the detail did affect the GPU performance greatly, just not GPU memory(please tell me you aren't basing your argument on amount of GPU memory used alone...). The GPU usage definitely goes up when detail is raised, the GPU has more polygons to draw.

And no, BF3 doesn't come close to GTA:IV when it comes to AI being controlled by the CPU, not close at all.

 

[slyfox2151]

Most definitely, my main rig with the GTX285 was either a Q6600 or a X3370(Q9650), I can't remember which it was at the time.

Yes, turning down the draw distance lowers the number of AI objects the CPU has to control. It isn't a hard concept to understand. Turning down the detail most definitely affected the GPU, not the CPU. The draw distance affected CPU because of the number of AI objects the CPU is controlling.

Here is a shocker, they actually coded the game to us multiple cores very well. Lets see some of those other "optimized" games do that. Oh, and they managed to simulate several city block worth of people and vehicles around the player at all times, in real time. What other games have you seen manage that with lower CPU load? Hell what other games have you seen manage that at all? Oh, and of those, which also have the gameplay being recorded constantly in the background with a FRAPS like style?

This +1

i often find myself agreeing with 60%+ of Newtekie1's posts

 

[Gaybacon]

What made the difference was the number of cores you had. Since consoles lack the GPU horsepower that we had in the PC at the time, most of the physics and open environment stuff was rendered on the CPU. The PS3 cell architecture, for example, can handle something like 6 to 8 threads. This was about a month or two after Nehalem came out. I moved from a C2Q at 3.2Ghz to my i7 920 and even the 920 at stock clocks kicked my overclocked Q9400 to the curb and laughed at it. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I literally doubled my frame rate with that one simple upgrade. It was at ~25-30 with the Q9400, the i7 920 was ~50. New or old OS did not matter.

I think this may have been one of the few times I've ever heard someone complain about a game taking advantage of multi-threading. Honestly though, I agree to some extent, but I have to wonder if their software was ever truly taking advantage of the cell architecture since they developed for the 360 as well. If they really wrote the engine correctly, then the PS3 version wouldn't be rendered at a lower resolution.

The game didn't even run 1080p textures. It scaled up a lower resolution texture for the high resolutions that the PC could run.

By the way, there are no such thing as "1080p textures." Texture resolution is independent of screen rendering resolution.

 

[newtekie1]

I think this may have been one of the few times I've ever heard someone complain about a game taking advantage of multi-threading. Honestly though, I agree to some extent, but I have to wonder if their software was ever truly taking advantage of the cell architecture since they developed for the 360 as well. If they really wrote the engine correctly, then the PS3 version wouldn't be rendered at a lower resolution.

Different cames prefer the different memory configurations. GTA likes the 512MB shared setup of the Xbox, and other games like FFXIII like the 256/256MB dedicated setup of the PS3. The resolution is pretty irrelevant to the problems that people complain about on the PC version though. That really does come down to the GPU performance, it is the other settings that start to hammer the CPU. And like I said, a major one was the fact that the PC version recorded all gameplay by default. We all know how much doing that really kills systems, and puts a strain on the CPU. Turning that feature off made the game a lot less CPU intensive.

 

[Gaybacon]

Different cames prefer the different memory configurations. GTA likes the 512MB shared setup of the Xbox, and other games like FFXIII like the 256/256MB dedicated setup of the PS3. The resolution is pretty irrelevant to the problems that people complain about on the PC version though. That really does come down to the GPU performance, it is the other settings that start to hammer the CPU. And like I said, a major one was the fact that the PC version recorded all gameplay by default. We all know how much doing that really kills systems, and puts a strain on the CPU. Turning that feature off made the game a lot less CPU intensive.

You keep comparing the recording system to FRAPS, but it's entirely unlike it because it records the actions of the objects in the environment rather than saving images of the frames. That's why camera angles can be changed on the fly within the replay editor.

 

[newtekie1]

You keep comparing the recording system to FRAPS, but it's entirely unlike it because it records the actions of the objects in the environment rather than saving images of the frames. That's why camera angles can be changed on the fly within the replay editor.

Very true, still very CPU intensive regardless.