What makes a game "unoptimized"

[KainXS]

I agree neverwinter nights 2 was a horribly horribly optimized game when the game came out NOTHING would max it, last card I played it, it still ran like crap.

and fallout 3 i don't know why but the fps always went from smooth(60) to 0 until it crashed wasteland, tried everthing, gave up and sold the game to a friend, had a 9800GTX when that happened too.

 

[exon1]

Has anyone ever played ARMA..?

 

[DrPepper]

Has anyone ever played ARMA..?

Yep like every day.

 

[Black Panther]

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?

 

[MilkyWay]

i was on campaign and playing for 2hrs then it just crashed and nothing had to restart, dont know why (empires total war)

im bumping up the gpu fan speed

 

[DrPepper]

i was on campaign and playing for 2hrs then it just crashed and nothing had to restart, dont know why (empires total war)

im bumping up the gpu fan speed

Try tickling its bollocks as well maybe it will play ball.

Cheers BP you reminded me about sims 2 and subsequently sim city 4. Those games lag like hell.

 

[MilkyWay]

fuck lets be honest you wouldnt like it if you just played 2 hours of a game and were doing well in it
then all of that work was for nothing!


fuck this i might as well break out the old dreamcast and play some tony hawks pro skater 2!

i got a game for you far cry 1 remember how that was a bitch to play at release, i mean come on after the patches it was better but still

 

[DrPepper]

fuck lets be honest you wouldnt like it if you just played 2 hours of a game and were doing well in it
then all of that work was for nothing!


fuck this i might as well break out the old dreamcast and play some tony hawks pro skater 2!

i got a game for you far cry 1 remember how that was a bitch to play at release, i mean come on after the patches it was better but still

I've worked on a campaign for 10 hours and its starting to crash I'l get piccies of the great british empire.

 

[v12dock]

Hellgate London, had to many problems with the game.....

 

[ShogoXT]

A very good example of optimized games are anything on the Unreal 3 engine and Devil May Cry 4, a port done right! Cept for the max shadow setting, some slight banding there.

 

[Polarman]

I usually stay away from unoptimized/broken games. I don't have most of the game on that list. Sims 2 does not give any problems btw.

It's true that many games come out unoptimized and/or broken even after a few patches. But i think there a lot more people that are using unoptimized PC's.

 

[MilkyWay]

unreal engine 3 is excellent its coded properly and is designed to work perfect on consoles and pcs

see at first i thought my pc was at fault but the game runs smooth and decided to crap ot for no reason, lol when it ran not so smooth it was fine

 

[DrPepper]

I am going to throw myself from a building ... again. Very tense battle I was outnumbered against the polish it was 3-1 and I only had rookie inf, I was winning and it crashes what a kick in the balls.

 

[ShadowFold]

Unreal 3 is abysmal honestly. Almost no native AA support(not like it matters, the games run like shit either way), games that use it run like ass and I personally don't think PhysX is all that great of an engine.
It's meant for the console market, and it shows.

 

[KainXS]

Unreal 3 is abysmal honestly. Almost no native AA support(not like it matters, the games run like shit either way), games that use it run like ass and I personally don't think PhysX is all that great of an engine.
It's meant for the console market, and it shows.

but. . . . it works

 

[DrPepper]

Unreal 3 is abysmal honestly. Almost no native AA support(not like it matters, the games run like shit either way), games that use it run like ass and I personally don't think PhysX is all that great of an engine.
It's meant for the console market, and it shows.

UE3 has its ups and downs. Today I figured out physx is shite from playing cryostasis. Anyway On the console they mostly run fine but the games all look similar and not unique. That's a problem with the source engine as well. Usually bad ports for the pc on unreal engine suck but then you get a good one that looks good and runs okay but they don't have especially good graphics, It uses too much bloom and its either very dark or very bright. Compared to crysis etc UE3 doesn't even come near the quality.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

The only game in recent memory I'd call unoptimize is Saints Row 2. If you don't have a tri-core processor, don't even try to play it.

 

[MadClown]

Fallout 3 has yet to crash on me, mabey i didnt play it long enough.

GTA 4 aint that bad compared to San Andreas when that came out.
Gears of War runs like butter.
All of the COD games are well optimized
Anything made by valve or using Valve's tech is 100% guaranteed to run at a million fps.
Far Cry 2 is a good example of how DX10 should be used, to bad it sucks.
Age of Empires 3 runs VERY good for how awesome it looks maxed out and how much shit can happen on screen.
Crysis is just too cool for us.
Anything from id is well optimized.
Now, Halo 2 is a mediocre port, shitty mouse support, bad scaling on lower hardware(not a prob for me lol) 360 buttons in place of kb buttons on the menus, poor netcode that was made with autoaim on the 360 controller in mind, i can go on.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. aint that bad, runs like orgasm on the dx8 renderer

 

[ArmoredCavalry]

Unreal 3 is abysmal honestly. Almost no native AA support(not like it matters, the games run like shit either way), games that use it run like ass and I personally don't think PhysX is all that great of an engine.
It's meant for the console market, and it shows.

Wait, what.... UT3 has always run amazingly well for me (if you don't count my old laptop with x1400)

All of the COD games are well optimized
Anything made by valve or using Valve's tech is 100% guaranteed to run at a million fps.
Far Cry 2 is a good example of how DX10 should be used, to bad it sucks.
Age of Empires 3 runs VERY good for how awesome it looks maxed out and how much shit can happen on screen.

Yah, COD runs great, along with source engine games. Agree about FC2 (nice gfx and runs well, but gameplay sux big time)
Also, oddly enough AOE3 had a ton of stuttering for me, until I figured out I had to force Vsync off, and that it was ignoring the in game Vsync setting (go figure). Now I have no issues with it though, and it does look really nice (especially considering it is getting on in years).

 

[EastCoasthandle]

What makes a game poorly optimized depends on how it's coded. Take a look at this article some time ago regarding BF2.

It intrigued me why Intel CPUs have inferior performance in some games and in others they are on par with AMD.

Therefore, I have reverse-engineered Battlefield 2 game executable and come to the following conclusions:

1. It was compiled using Visual Studio 2003 C++ compiler.
2. It was compiled in blended mode almost without any optimizations.

Times have changed since this article was written but the gist of it is simple; a game should fully utilize a cpu and all it has to offer. The opposite end of the spectrum IMO is the release of a game called Ghost Busters which will utilize the CPU to do physics.

And lets not forget Quake 4 which came out with a patch (1.05 patch) to include Hyper-Threading improvements. One of the 1st games I know of that did this successfully. Although it took a few more patches to fix a few bugs.

 

[sixor]

mercenaries 2, that crap is non optimezed like hell

also do not make me talk about matrix games, scarface, all nfs, tomb raider legend, gta san andreas

good games are, bioshock, ut3, gears of war, grid, pure, hl2

 

[exon1]

Gothic 3 pwns.

Srsly, the worst game ever.

 

[Ongaku]

really? awww...

The Witcher before the Enhanced Edition patch was absolute crap...it took anywhere from 2-5 mins to load the next area back when I had 2 GB of RAM...played it with my 3.5GB and still....

 

[DrPepper]

mercenaries 2, that crap is non optimezed like hell

also do not make me talk about matrix games, scarface, all nfs, tomb raider legend, gta san andreas

good games are, bioshock, ut3, gears of war, grid, pure, hl2

Bioshock had a massive problem with amd cpu's and that you couldn't get past the first area also there was no talking or sound whatsoever. I don't know if it was a problem with AMD cpu's but when I changed my athlon for a q6600 it went away.

 

[crtecha]

This is what i did to fix bioshock and the sound issue

http://doubleparity.net/2007/08/bioshock-no-sound