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.
I think FO3 is more buggy than unoptimized.
Runs fine on both my systems, despite having FFD show, despite one system being overclocked yet having dedicated soundcard, despite my other system having SLI and no dedicated sound card... Yet for some others, they have to disable FFDshow, or buy a soundcard, or disable SLI...
For me a game is unoptimized when it gives less fps or image quality than one would expect with one's hardware.
On the other hand, a game is buggy when it performs well on one computer meeting the requirements, yet doesn't on another pc which also meets or exceeds the requirements.
Comparing Crysis with GTA4 - in my opinion Crysis is far more optimised than GTA4.
Haven't tried GTA on laptop, but on desktop I get a playable experience with Crysis and lovely graphics on high whereas on GTA4 I get crappy un-aliased graphics and flickering shadows which remind me of the quality of 10 year old games.
I suspect though that GTA4 needs processing power. I haven't played it since I got the E8400 @ 4Ghz but only with the E4300 @ 3Ghz, and I never tried it on the quad on laptop.
Oblivion... for me that was unoptimised. It's long since I played it and I have never as yet on the laptop, but on my desktop with 8800GT and E4300 @ 3Ghz I used to get fps which would be maxed out at 60 and get sudden drops to 30 and back up. Now 30fps should be ok, but not when you have the jump 60-30-60 because that causes stutter. It'd be better for one to maintain a flat 35-40 fps rather than having enormous jumps (causing stuttering) in fps.
On the other hand, FO3 for me runs just fine on both pc's. I've read posts on Bethesda Forums from guys who have better hardware... and for whom the game doesn't even run. Which is weird, and definitely a case for saying that the game is buggy and not un-optimized.
Also, The Sims 2 is buggy.
I post regularly on TSR forums, where a lot of people just can't run the game without having it really slow... on a quad core! Their only solution would be to go in task manager to get game running on one core.
On the other hand, I can run it on my laptop's quad with no problems...
Why should a game have problems on one quad and not another?