Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield
(www.destructoid.com)
from Mystify0771@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 11 Sep 2023 16:07
https://lemmy.world/post/4867673
from Mystify0771@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 11 Sep 2023 16:07
https://lemmy.world/post/4867673
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
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I wonder if this has anything to do with not being able to load my saves. I went to mars and exited the game after a long gaming session. Came back the next day and I get a full system crash upon trying to load the exit save. Tried the autosaves, same deal. Tried my last normal save, same deal. Every once in about 5-6 full system crashes I can reload one of the saves from just landing on mars but if I try to enter caledonia then it’s a full system crash. It’s weird too, I can still hear the game running in a loop but I can tell there is no input and the graphics fully fail. Very frustrating. I finally got back to my main rig to be able to play and the game has just been straight not playable since about the day after it came out. Can’t even get a hotfix from Bethesda. Bummer. I’ll just have to wait to play it again. I’m not going to restart a new character just to run into the same thing.
The crash on loading has bricked two of my characters now. I don’t think I can be bothered again till they patch. One bricked in mars, the second bricked before I made it there. Waste io many hours.
That’s where I’m at. I’m excited to be able to play again but I have to wait for however long it takes them to release a patch addressing this. I’m not mad about anything I’ve seen. But I literally can’t play a game that I can’t trust to save and be reloaded.
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Well that’s a truly horrible experience… I think it warrants a refund
Normally, I’d fully recommend that but I still want to play the game. I was actually really enjoying myself. I’ll just wait until they actually issue a patch. I’m a little shocked not even one hotfix has gone out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole team took a vacation right when the game went into early access. But yes, it is very odd that not one patch has come out yet. I’m sure if everyone did take a vacation, they are probably mostly back now and working on it.
Yeah I bet everyone needed a break after they finally launched. Hopefully the r&r helps them come back fresh to knock some of these issues out.
Why do you assume they're going to issue a patch?
They patched Skyrim, fallout 4 and 76. They are a big enough studio that I have no reason to believe they’d just release it and move on. I’m not talking about changing what the game is. I’m just talking about technical patches to do some bug fixing.
Are you playing on PC/Steam? Something weird happened to me yesterday where an exit save wouldn’t load. Upon trying an earlier save, I found none would load (game crashed to desktop when selecting). I could not figure it out.
On a whim I verified files in Steam, which triggered a 30 MB update. After verification, my exit save worked fine. I’m at a loss for why core files would change.
Yup, steam with a Ryzen 5600x and rx 6800xt. I’ve tried verifying the game files a couple times. I’ll give it another go in a bit. I’d love for there to be a change but I think I’m in that weird category that should work fine but it’s just borked. The game ran great otherwise. Just trying to load saves and on the one attempt that actually works if I try to enter Caledonia it’s an automatic I have to reboot my system.
I had the same problem, this vkd3d update fixed it. But had to run it with lutris where i can select the vkd3d version manually.
I’d assume an issue possibly at the engine level isn’t something that a mod can fix?
The end of the article seems to say as much. However, it seems the Vkd3d developers are trying to improve what they can.
if it run better on linux because of that i’m gonna laugh so much
That did happen with Elden Ring. Valve found an issue with it and patched it for Vulkan, so it ran better on Steam Deck than Windows.
I had a single crash playing starfield on PopOS. Other than that, it’s been incredibly performant for me. Ryzen 5700x and 6700xt GPU
I’ve got nearly the same specs (5800x and 6700XT), and mine crashes fairly often.
I've had not a single crash so far and most of my frame dipping issues (from 60 to 40) were solved by lowering the shadows to medium. The only bugs I had were ships spawning in other ships so they spaz out, but that's very rare. On the other hand, Baldurs Gate 3 would constantly drop to 10 FPS and I had severe bugs that locked me out of entire questlines.
But I guess I'm not allowed to enjoy games and have fun because gamebryo = bad
I’m on a 7600x + 6600XT, and the only crash I’ve ever had was yesterday when loading a save. Also running Pop.
I mean, you could run VKD3D on Windows too to get the improvements.
No, Todd Howard doesn’t make mistakes, you just have to buy a more expensive graphics card!
/s
Todd Howard doesn't do what Todd Howard does for Todd Howard. Todd Howard does what Todd Howard does because Todd Howard is... Todd Howard.
The Todd Howardest.
He permits you to bathe in the light of his Todd Howardishness.
It’s actually just pee, but not just any pee, Todd fucking Howard’s pee
Totally unrelated but did you know there’s a promotion deal for AMD’s latest and greatest RX7000 GPUs?
Quite the coincidence huh /s
Best Buy had Starfield free with a 6700XT the other day when I was pricing out a move from Nvidia.
Sure but bundling the latest game with a gpu has been common practice by both green and red for a while. When the Egyptian assassins creed was coming out I remember seeing a card next to the GPUs at Microcenter saying you got it free with a qualifying purchase.
No matter how expensive your Intel Arc GPU was, Starfield won't run on it.
The Intel Arcs are really cheap though.
Also, Intel are going pretty hard with driver updates and fixes. I’m really hoping they make it, we need more competition.
The main issue is probably nobody works with Intel to do any testing before launch.
I took a gamble on the Arc 770 when I built my PC a few months ago, because I honestly am not too keen on the current GPU generation. Like why would I want to pay through my nose for cards that are incredibly power inefficient, with tendencies to catch fire to boot? The Arc series offered decent performance (save for old DX9 games and such, but I already had a GTX970 I could use for those if need be), and shocking amounts of memory, so I gave it a shot and I’m really happy with it.
I have some weird graphical glitches in FFXIV from time to time. It’s nothing overly annoying, sometimes a box will flicker on the screen for a frame, and sometimes the light fades out briefly. Other than that I’ve had no issues, it’s chugging along really well. My biggest (and only) gripe with the card is the control centre software not allowing you to remap keybinds. That’s pretty dumb.
All that said, I’m not a hardcore gamer by any means, I don’t buy all the latest AAA games at launch (often not at all, really) and I don’t care much for maxing out my graphics and running at 900FPS.
It just works.
That’s false, the mistakes are part of the experience.
If this is such a big issue then Bethesda should make it a top priority to fix it, it does sound like a complicated issue though.
They should but its Bethesda. A company that misread the room thinking people making memes about how unoptimized their games are meant fans thought it was endearing rather than something deserving of mockery.
Or let the community fix it for them
That’s exactly what they’re going to do because it costs nothing. The problem is they won’t ever accept the community fixes into official updates since they’re binary patches or file replacements.
As usual, it takes free labor for Bethesda to get their shit working the way it’s supposed to. What a garbage developer.
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Well written? Bethesda?
I mean sure their games are fun, but they’re not particularly good by any measure.
So many PS5 owners in the comments today
I’m gonna go back to enjoying Starfield
Bye, go collect your trinkets
Thanks for admitting you’re just a butt hurt hater
I’m not sure what this means. Is the game not on PS5?
You’re absolutely free to enjoy the game. Like I mentioned in the comments, Bethesda’s game is like instant ramen. It can definitely be delicious and enjoyable, but it’s not good/healthy food.
Lmao, bruh you haven’t played the game … slow it down on the haterade, it’s not good for ya
Hey now. Morrowind was beautifully written.
Then by Oblivion they cheapened out and used AI to start generating the map and dungeons.
Oblivion being developed with AI driven layouts is a hilarious supposition. It was 2002 dawg.
Oblivion was 2006, Morrowind was 2002.
Regardless, your point still stands.
No it doesn't.
Morrowind's entire map was hand made. All of its quests were hand made.
Starting with Oblivion, they moved to make most of the map and quests automatically with minimal human intervention.
To the point that they admitted it was too much for the tech at the time and actually hurt the gameplay, and pulled back for Skyrim, using a mix of computer made and human made content, adding in the radiant quest system in an attempt.to make the gameplay "endless".
The modern thing we call AI is just the chatbots from a decade prior with improved processing power and vastly larger data sets to work with. The tech in those chatbots had been working in various pieces for a decade before that.
There’s a lot of interesting world building and history to draw upon, it’s just a shame Bethesda doesn’t do that.
You’re never really presented with moral choices. The story never really has you think about things. There’s a tonne of lore books and tapes and what have yous that spill a rich tapestry of stories at you, but you’re never really shown any of it. I’ve had fun with Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim, and to a lesser extent Fallout 4, but at this point I’m kind of tired of it. They’re all the same game. They have the same floaty combat. The same lacklustre storytelling. The same awkward “talk at you” conversations.
Been there, done that.
what does this even mean? “sure they’re fun” and also “not particularly good by any measure” are conflicting statements
Biodome with Pauly Shore is one of my favorite movies. I have fun every time i watch it. It’s not a “good” movie.
I would like to add Hook to this list. I was flabbergasted when, as an adult, found out it was poorly received. Then I rewatched it as an adult and was forced to agree. Still one of my favorites.
isn’t it “good” by the measure of it being your favorite?
Fast food can be delicious and filling, but it’s not good food.
Bethesda makes the game equivalent to fast food. Specifically instant ramen. You can tweak instant ramen, add veggies, eggs, meat, seasonings, etc. and transform it into something new. It’s still instant ramen, but it’s different.
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this is a completely different argument. Fast food is “good by any measure” because it’s good by the measure of delicious and of filling. It doesn’t make sense to complement something and then say it’s not good in any aspect.
E.G. Fallout 4 is fantastic exploration.
It's best gameplay is when your ignore the plot entirely and create your own story.
Same with Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Oblivion.
The actual main plots are simplistic, boring and oddly quick. Weirdly, each of the games has an expansion that has a well done quest line, so its not that they can't do it, they choose to not do it.
Yeah when people tell me that Fallout or Skyrim are "well written" I know that they don't read.
Better than Larian and Fromsoft by a country mile
It does not matter how extensive the lore, character design and world building is if the fucking game runs like shit and crashes. The game being in a playable state is the bare minimum.
Its like a chef spending hours decorating a dish made with spoiled raw chicken.
The fact that it literally can’t run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?
And don’t even get me started on how I keep feeling like I’m playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I’ve heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield…
This is what happens when a new console generation comes around. Just because you are on PC does not mean you are exempt from industry norms which are largely pushed by consoles. Your 970 was significantly stronger than the xbox one and the ps4, so you could use it for that entire generation if you wanted. Your 2060 is weaker than the xbox series x and the ps5, so should be no surprise that you use lower settings than those consoles.
Same with ssds. They werent required for so long because the consoles didnt have them. Now they do, and fast ones at that. So devs use them, and sometimes require them.
Now obviously starfield in particular is not a shining beacon of next gen technology and optimization. But those reasons you chose to pick on are not really examples of its failings.
It’s worth noting that though those are the “recommended” settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I’ve played, including other AAA releases from this year. It’s my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA’s recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I’ve ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.
I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it’s all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.
Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.
Bethesda is sub-par in just about every aspect of game development. Shallow combat. Basic dialogue trees. Skill/feats haven't evolved in several games. Engine so old it has to have loading screens for every type of transition.
But you picked the story and acting to tout as good? Bethesda is well-known to have pathetically bad main-story arcs. Only a handful of side quests end up being engaging to most people. The face animations are...better now but still deeply in the uncanny valley. Their acting is usually deadpan with only the merest speck of emotion and shown as if the actor is reading their script for the first time during recording.
Honestly the main thing that Bethesda games have going for them are a detailed, hand-crafted world that is fun to explore and experiment in. Which...Bethesda handily disposed of to have the majority of its world and worlds be procedurally generated.
Wow, so informed you are, you are talking of Starfield right?
You wouldn’t happen to just be talking out of your ass trying to make broad generalizations about games made 20 years apart to try and cast shade on a game you’ve never played would you?
This comment doesn't actually say anything. It's just casting aspirations against me because you didn't like what I said. It doesn't rebut anything or offer differing opinions on anything I proposed.
I’m not sure I’d give them well acted. The characters feel like puppets when they are talking. Maybe I’m just spoiled by BG3…
I was able to install the DLSS mod which helped some but there’s still performance issue even with using the DF optimized settings. I assume this will be fixed with driver and game updates but who knows how long that will take.
Until people forget.
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People figured out the performance issues with Starfield when it was first announced: the Bethesda logo
Creation Engine 2.0.
AKA Creation Engine 1.0 with more patches than a 1sqmi quilt.
Evolution isn’t wrong. It’s not like Unreal Engine gets rewritten from scratch for each major version.
That’s not really a good metaphor for software.
Or maybe it is if you meant how many weird and inefficient things living creatures have because it was good enough. Think about that the next time you accidentally choke on nothing
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_evolution
Exactly, people forget that most of the well known engines today are as old or older than Creation Engine, they're all patched/upgraded as it fits, though Creation Engine has no apparent version numbers and it's made by Bethesda so you get free internet points and a feeling of superiority for hating on the popular thing.
If you took these folks opinions as truth you'd think Bethesda games are massive flops that barely sell 10 copies and are a study case on how not to develop a game, but the real world is very different from the echo chamber...
It boggles my mind how many things people say about this game that are patently untrue, obviously extremely biased against the game/studio, or make it seem like this game killed their dog.
The game has issues, for sure, some things like the nonexistent city/building local map systems are indefensible, but damn dude, I wish people would just try to have mature discussions with realistic expectations about it instead of whatever this shit show is that we call "gaming discussions"
For $120 AUD expectations will be high.
Sure, if the game doesn't appeal to you for that value, then there will be eventual sales. It won't be worth that amount to everyone. Doesn't really excuse the overly emotional criticism, or even the overly emotional defense from others. It's a good game. A true value judgment from there will be harder and more tied to individual tastes.
Gamers will never be mature or have realistic expectations. They cannot fathom that people are enjoying a thing they don't like, and they're very vocal about it, it's petty, really.
I try to move myself off of these discussions but there's always one comment that drags me down the well because it's so blatantly untrue, but it's miserable. Lemmy, kbin and Reddit are overly negative places where it seems the goal is to get everyone mad with terrible takes.
People need to remember that opinions aren't factsz and learn to shut the fuck up and let people enjoy things.
You want people to have more mature discussions but then disavow any nuance in the same breath. Do you not see how this is a contradiction?
Oh don’t get me wrong, Bethesda games are generally great (with notable exceptions like Fallout 76), and do phenomenally well in sales. However, dismissing any and all criticism of the games’ numerous flaws (including glitches which often carry over between subsequent titles, like clipping through collision boxes and falling through maps) is willful ignorance at its finest. Every Bethesda game has performance issues and game-breaking bugs, and there was no reason to expect Starfield to be any different in that regard.
These are famously common bugs across games in all genres running on all kinds of different engines. I’d go so far as to not even call them bugs because computers simply don’t have the power to calculate collision down to the picosecond/picometer. Every game that’s ever been made has sacrificed precision in physics for performance.
Perhaps the reason it’s more noticeable in Bethesda games is because they typically have way more persistent, physics-enabled objects. That’s actually a strength of the engine, and something no other developer really even attempts.
Correct, but we aren’t talking about them. Whataboutism isn’t constructive.
Actually, a large proportion of OoB clips in games are due to some combination of lacking speed caps and having acute angles in collision boxes.
Correct, and I’m not disputing this.
This definitely contributes to the issues common in Bethesda games, but it’s not the only reason. Take Skyrim for example: some of its best-known glitches (such as restoration bonuses buffing enchantments, the various duplication glitches, and basically everything involving horses) have nothing to do with the number of dynamic objects loaded.
Not really - plenty of other games use Havok physics and don’t suffer from the same issues, or at least not to the same degree. Perhaps there’s a reason other developers using the Havok physics engine don’t make games with huge quantities of dynamic objects loaded at once.
Uh… you were talking about them. Those are the two examples of bugs that you provided. I literally wouldn’t have made the comment if you hadn’t brought them up.
Like if you had said these originally, I wouldn’t have even argued with you. I never personally experienced those bugs, probably because I don’t play games like I’m a QA tester, but I know many people did.
I’ve definitely fallen through the world in several of the games listed there. But anyway, specifically, I said persistent physics objects. You can drop a cabbage in Whiterun, walk to Solitude and back, and the cabbage is right where you left it. In, say, GTA, you get out of your car and look away for 5 seconds, turn around, and it’s gone. Most games work more like GTA, where a limited number of objects even have full physics simulation, and those that do are only in memory if you’ve looked at them in the last x seconds. Otherwise, they unload and are lost forever.
Now, whether it’s even worth having so much physics-enabled clutter is another question. It certainly contributes to immersion, but is it more trouble than it’s worth?
Or the Source 2 engine, which is just a patched version of the Quake 1 engine.
Evolution frequently discards baggage.
Bethesda just keep piling shit on top without doing any of the necessary groundwork to make it run well.
You can only reinvent the Bounding Box once. Epic is a better steward of technical debt. Bethesda doesn’t know what that is.
But with the optimization quality of current UE 5 games I’m quite pessimistic about the current trend of game development.
Except unreal engine literally was rewritten from 3 to 4.
Which is, literally, not every major version. I didn’t say “all Unreal Engine versions are evolutionary steps over their predecessors”, I said “they don’t get rewritten from scratch for each major version”.
Someone else also brought up the Quake engine, which has even more evolutionary steps; even with forks like the Source engine.
aka Gamebryo
That's the engine in which Creation Engine was based on, so what? Saying that name won't somehow invalidate everything that was developed using the two engines or accomplish anything really. By your logic, we should call Source 2 engine the Quake engine
I know you say that as a joke but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bethesda splash screen genuinely had some actual performance cost
It’s the same trash engine they’ve used for 20 years. To be perfectly honest, they should put it in the ground and build a new one from scratch instead of pushing their Frankenstein engine along.
But how is it getting worse? Or did you always had to load every door you open. I honestly can't remember
Yeah you always have. They’ve been screwing modern graphics features to the old dog for years and hoping it’ll continue to work. There’s some serious limitations in it that another engine would be able to work through for a game like this. Seamless planet travel for one, and less abrupt loading.
People really have no idea about anything in game development. I agree it should have seemless planet travel, but it is not something that an engine “can just do.” It takes so many complicated systems to make that function. There’s no engine that does it out of the box.
Basically any engine can do it, but it requires it to be built. The land must be deterministic at all points, it must be able to create chunks accurately for all points (which gets really weird at the poles, but any latitude above 0 because your chunks shouldn’t be square anymore), and they must be able to be streamed in to their correct position seemlessly.
It is quite complicated, and there’s no reason the engine developed for an arena shooter (Unreal) would be able to handle it any better than any other engine. It just has to be built.
There’s a reason Hello Games wrote their own engine for NMS. We all know that it was pretty bad gameplay-wise at launch, but under the hood NMS was (and still is) something of a technical marvel. No loading screens except for a disguised one when jumping between systems is quite impressive.
Impressive for sure. They had to choose to not have a lot of things to do it though. They knew what they wanted and did it, which is smart.
Also, IIRC, NMS doesn’t have different gravities, right? Been a year or two since I properly played, but I don’t remember ever really jumping higher or being forced to the ground. That’s one of the sacrifices for seamless landing.
I don't buy this. Plenty of games allow you to adjust gravity on the fly using console commands. All they would have to do if you enter a new planet's atmosphere, is adjust the gravity value.
Source engine has allowed this forever, changing gravity on the fly. No reason it can't be implemented in other engines.
I guess though I mean it is expected at this stage of game development for this genre to have something like seamless planet travel for a space game. Like it didn’t have to be NMS or Elite Dangerous, they could’ve copied something like how Jedi Fallen Order did it, where basically your ship takes off from the planet, jumps to hyperspace and loads the next one during hyperspace and lets you know when you’re ‘arriving’ (aka when the destination is loaded) and you then take an action and land on the loaded planet. It ends up being the same thing as what Starfield basically does but handles it much more deftly.
Idk, just saying there’s better ways they could’ve handled it even if the engine couldn’t handle seamless planet travel in a traditional sense.
I have no game dev experience but I have a math and software background. I’m just curious about what “it gets weird at the poles” means. If I wanted to (abstractly) generate tiny square chunks of a large sphere, I would generate them as (proper) squares and then pass them through an explicit diffeomorphism to the associated region of the sphere, relying on the relative smallness to guarantee that the diffeomorphism doesn’t change things too much. From a game dev perspective, what approach do you take that causes issues at the poles?
Imagine trying to find the intersections of a line or region as it crosses multiple cells of a non-euclidian “grid” near the poles where an entire axis can flip from one cell to the next.
Are you suggesting using a stereographic projection? That seems like a bad idea. You wouldn’t want your projection to depend on the coordinate system. Am I missing a reason why you wouldn’t use proper, nonsingular spherical coordinates?
Games, support libraries, and engines don’t really support spherical coordinate systems. If you don’t want to write everything from scratch, you gotta go Cartesian.
You can still use local Cartesian coordinates.
Sure, I guess, but constantly mapping between them gets complicated and adds overhead. Plus, now you are dealing with curves instead of lines when checking for intersections, and that gets far more expensive to compute when you are trying to do thousands if not millions of checks per frame when trying to run at 60 or 120 frames per second.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible, just that games haven’t traditionally been written that way, so you can’t build on what they have already figured out. That makes it harder to find people who have game dev experience in that kind of math.
Unreal is older than their engine no? And everyone uses that…so what does this even mean?
The difference is that Epic barely makes games. They have their Fortnite which they can put in some minor effort to keep the money flowing and otherwise they can focus on the engine. Maybe with MS now being behind Bethesda they can also put in more work into their engine…maybe. We’ll see.
Looks like Hans implemented a workaround in vkd3d-proton 2.10, using the open-source AMD vulkan driver on linux (RADV).
I don’t imagine it will take long for this to make its way into a Proton experimental release. Folks with AMD graphics who are comfortable with linux might want to give it a try.
There’s a Bethesda parody from a few years ago: youtu.be/YPN0qhSyWy8
I can’t wait to see the whole Disney movie where Todd Howard is the villain with the catchy song about being evil.
I’m eagerly awaiting the radio silence from all the people blaming it on obsolete hardware lol
Overall I like the game though, it has a lot of very entertaining ideas.
You’re just taking the claim of some random guy and a website at face value though.
It’s not just “some guy”, it’s a translation layer developer posting all of his findings on his git: github.com/…/88e4f300cc0b5b6f0880c1233d562cf506b5…
It’s also verified by Proton users noting a marked increase in performance with just a code commit. I’d urge anyone not to listen to this troll and go have a look.
This really isn’t a good take when the “random guy” has provided proof, open source code demonstrating, and a relatively easy way to verify his claims (using his code).
It’s all there out in the open if anyone has specific counter points, and this type of thing isn’t an unusual situation with Bethesda developed games, or games on this engine.
It’s clearly not due to obsolete hardware. Not getting 60fps in New Atlantis while playing on a beast with 50-70% usage max points to optimization issues.
I honestly don’t know why those people think it’s hardwareOh it’s because Todd Howard said so
I dont understand how this is even an argument dude, bethesda has the worst reputation for this stuff. Literally every game they have released has been buggy as shit with terrible performance, but for some reason people just handwave it and say “its a bethesda game” when did they get so brainwashed, why is it acceptable for them??
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Yeah, exactly. I’m getting tired of this too. Even with all of the evidence in the world that this issue is halving game performance people are still dismissing it. $1000 dollars worth of performance I paid for down the drain and yet “a smooth 60 FPS” is enough justification for people.
It’s like if somebody sold you a full-priced V8 that had 4 of the cylinders not firing and your peers telling you to deal with it because “at least it runs”.
I mean people are trying to say it’s another FO76. It’s not even remotely close to another FO76.
It blows my mind how critical everyone was of Cyberpunk, despite it running fairly well on PC especially a few weeks after release, and how much of a pass everyone gives Starfield.
Do we know for sure that the Starfield devs weren’t able to figure out the problems with performance? I find often with companies, the larger they are, the more bureaucracy there is, and the more prioritization of tickets becomes this huge deal, where you even end up having meetings about how to prioritize tickets etc.
I would be surprised if the devs didn’t know what was wrong already, I think it’s more likely that management and higherups doesn’t care about them fixing it right now.
Game devs have many teams all with different jobs, for a big game like this you'd typically have multiple teams dedicated to optimization in different areas (and between them). The specific problem in this case was how the game was communicating with graphics drivers (among others), which for any graphics heavy game is very fundamental to performance optimization. The problems aren't even an after-the-fact optimization sort of thing that teams should have to identify and follow-up on, batching jobs is standard practice when interacting with GPUs whether or not there's a translation layer.
When the devs of a core translation API between two supported graphics drivers that are commonplace in the gaming ecosystem have to write code to specifically fix issues with your application you've done something fundamentally wrong.
A lot of posts like these also seem to imply that the open source community should somehow be less competent than these companies and are surprised that the open source community can fix these issues. But the open source community has a ton of very respectable and extremely smart developers, it shouldn’t be any surprise really.
To be even more direct: there’s a huge overlap between the circles of “works in software dev” and “contributes to open source projects”.
I really try to do different things at home than work, but I’ve definitely contributed fixes to game mods (why do so many modders fail to do null checks before trying to interact with short lived shit like projectiles?) and open source software I’ve needed to do stuff.
I’ll play in a year after most of the bug and performance issues are fixed. Which seems like my typical response to any major game release these days; just wait a few months at first.
The issues are way overblown. I have a mid tier system as best (2070S 8700k) and with the DLSS mod and some performance tweaks I play on Ultra.
Edit: down vote all you want losers you’re still wrong.
The issues are way overblown. I just bought a new car and with brand new tires and a few tweaks from my local repair shop I can go the speed limit now.
How is a 2070S equivalent to a new car?
I love Starfield and has been playing it every day since launch. It runs like dogshit. Sure it doesn’t stutter or anything but I can’t, for the life of me, get the average FPS in outdoor areas to be anything higher than 70. 5800X + 3080 Ti. It doesn’t matter how much I lower the setting, the CPU overhead is crazy.
so it does not stutter or anything and it does run on an average of 70fps outside and in taxing environments and you are describing this as dogshit?
lol. no further questions.
Give it up mate, even the first rudimentary workaround more than doubled the FPS people have been getting. linustechtips.com/…/1530726-starfield-now-runs-tw…
I won’t click on a LinusTechTip Link 😀
And I dont say the game could be better optimised, but to say that a stutter-free expierence with an average of 70 fps is “runing like dogshit” is some kind of special. Could it be better, yes, is it running like dogshit, nope.
🤦 So you’ll just continue to ignore overwhelming evidence and get defensive. It’s ironic you’d call them special.
70 fps on average without any kind of wrong framepacing or stuttering is not “running like dogshit”, thats my whole point, “mate”. If the the game would run with 30 fps and crazy frame spikes on modern hardware I would agree but to call a >60fps stutterfree expierence that is just supid, on every game.
If you wouldn’t call having your performance more than halved dogshit, I don’t really give a fuck what you have to say.
Feel free to not answer to my posts. Please. I’m more than fine never to hear from you again…
He’s kinda right though. You are partially too, the game doesn’t run great but it runs fine. Definitely not dogshit. Hogwarts ran way worse for what it was with similar performance but also tons of stuttering on the best setups not to mention lots of crashing in multiple big AAA games this year. Starfield afaik has none of that, it just has lower than expected FPS but not terribly so.
By the standard of being playable, I get that. But I’m not here to mince words. When you zoom out and look at the big picture, this one incorrectly used driver call turns a 3080ti into a 2060. A $1000 difference in performance. Defending Bethesda is just going to make future issues worse and worse.
I guess. I do have the luxury of having a 4090 and I’ve simply seen much smaller games with similar graphics run…similar if not much worse than this. Perhaps others have a different experience but besides the frames being lower than I would like I’m kinda glad such a huge game doesn’t constantly crash for me or stutter every time is press the “sprint” button in a crowded area.
I do hope for improvement though
Other people in these comments have been reporting Starfield crashes, some of which “brick a character” apparently if it happens on an exit save (which you can’t opt out of lol). Any sentiment of “it could be worse” just weakens our position as consumers IMO.
If I set the resolution to 1024x768 and the graphics to Low but the FPS is still the same, something is wrong.
That just means the bottleneck isn’t graphics rendering.
it seems the current meta is to hate on starfield at the moment. I would suggest to keep playing and enjoying the game if you do and not to post about it.
That is always the meta with new and popular AAA games. Especially since PS players are salty MS denied them the game there’s even more salt and a lot of tribalism hehe.
except if the game is Zelda or Elden Ring 😅, which both also ran pretty bad
Well Nintendo has a shitton of tribalism considering how anti consumer they are in general. Fromsoft just has a lot of good reputation…justifiably so
I will wait regardless.
Plus you’ll get to see if they add all the post-launch microtransactions like games are starting to do these days.
Launch to good reviews, and THEN rebalance and force players towards transactions and paid currencies.
Plus Plus you can get it on sale.
Yup… dodged Diablo 4 by doing this.
Kinda sad about it though, really enjoyed Diablo II back in the day. Really miss the days when the name Blizzard meant guaranteed quality.
The silver lining here is that now when you see Blizzard, you know to avoid it no matter what.
They’ll probably have Creation Club stuff, like in Skyrim and FO4, where they contract modders to create small pieces of content.
im actively hoping they do
Yea, it’s maddening.
Even before release I figured I’d wait for a sale. Too many good games just came out I want more, big backlog of Yakuza games I recently started and got totally hooked on. Not interested in helping standardize $70 games, will wait for a sale, and by then there will be a better mod scene too. Less money for a better game, win/win.
Ah, I see your a r/patientgamers fan too =)
Try Armored Core 6, 100% worth it day one
I can’t disbelieve the rocket skating and I feel lame
Sadly not my kind of game, but thank you!
Armored Core VI and Baldur’s Gate III are two big recently published games that do work quite well. They stand on the shoulders of two respectable companies.
Yea BG3 is amazing, but I still waited at least a couple of weeks before touching it.
Waiting is what I would do when I had to wait for allowance. I can wait now too!
I’ve played it a little on Xbox since it’s on gamepass and I haven’t encountered any bugs, other than a single game crash. Is the PC release significantly worse than console?
Doesn’t feel revolutionary but I’m enjoying it. Created Amos Burton and it’s a pretty fun playthru so far.
Edit: Okay so let me correct that to replicatible crashes after xbox captures (both screenshots and recordings).
I’m having no issues on PC either.
I’ve had 0 hard crashes but a few soft crashes since entering the final stretch of the MSQ. Sarah and Walter are stuck “talking” to each other permanently despite Sarah being in my ship and Walter the lodge. And if I try to talk to either of them the game locks up whenever it’s time for the other npc to chime in and I have to reload. I also had a random soft crash where I couldn’t enter the lodge from new Atlantis no matter what I did until I restarted the .exe(I’m thinking it’s related to the convos bug I’m experiencing). Also the weird movement bugs like someone walking away from you during a convo or crew members floating in or through random places in my ship. Also have a flashing texture issue for a few seconds after accessing the inventories in the armory ship habs.
Outside that I’m getting 50-70 fps with mostly high settings at 1080p.
I preferred the Little Mermaid, the Ugly Duckling, and of course the Emperor’s New Groove, but his commentary on graphics in Starfield is also a compelling work.
Why hasn’t emperor’s new groove gotten a remake yet tho
Not safe enough. Give it another decade; I’m sure they’ll get around to ruining it by then.
Thank you, I too did a double take on the name.
For anyone wondering, the author is called “Hans Christian Andersen”.
I’m inclined to believe this, and this likely isn’t even the whole extent of it. I’ve been playing on a Series X, but decided to check it out on my Rog Ally. On low, at 720p with FSR2 on, I’d get 25-30fps in somewhere like New Atlantis. I downloaded a tweaked .ini for the Ultra preset and now not only does the game look much better, but the city is up closer to 40fps, with most other areas being 45-60+. Makes me wonder what it was they thought was worth the massive cost that the default settings give, with no real visual improvement.
Another odd thing, if I’m playing Cyberpunk or something, this thing is in the 90%+ CPU and GPU utilization range, with the temps in the 90c+ range. Starfield? GPU is like 99%, CPU sits around 30%, and the temp is <=70c, which basically doesn’t happen playing any other “AAA” game. I could buy Todd’s comments if the frame rate was crap, but this thing was maxed out… but not getting close to full utilization on a handheld with an APU indicates something less simple.
I’m hoping the work from Hans finds its way to all platforms (in one way or another), because I’d love to use the Series X but 30fps with weird HDR on a 120hz OLED TV actually makes me a little nauseous after playing for a while, which isn’t something I commonly have a problem with.
From my experience on the Steam Deck is doesn’t matter if I run low graphics or medium graphics (some high settings) the performance is almost the same
“Just upgrade your PC bro”
It’s running fine on my RTX 5090.
Honestly never knew there were people having performance issues. I haven’t really gone to any communities discussing the game til now and the game runs fine on my PC.
Bless my old pre-shortage 2070 S, medium on a 2K screen without any issues.
Maybe it’s because I’m only running at 1920x1080, but it runs fine for me on high settings.
TBH I was joking. I can’t personally vouch for any issues as I haven’t played.
Nah, Bethesda will just do the same as they did with the Creation Engine. Let the community patch their crap and never fix it.
It’s shitty but at the same time, if people are gonna do it anyway… idk it’s tacky and the audacity to slap a $70+ price tag on the thing? Fuck that
Just wish they would have incorporated the fixes into the game engine at some point. I bet some of the devs would have even signed away the code for free or at least very cheap. It was annoying not being able to use mods to fix bugs in Fallout 76 that were patched in Fallout and Elder Scrolls games some as far back as Morrowind. Sure they were mostly rare like being able to get pushed into the void behind what should have been solid meshes and the game engine seeming not to care as you fall endlessly or it crashed.
Bethesda needs to start handing out checks to these people for fixing their fucking games dude
Maybe it’s their business model to have players fix the games for free?
And you know to some extent, having a community help you with your games and find bugs is beautiful and probably pretty fucking cool for devs. But the fact is that the business side of things continues to put a sour taste in all of our mouths, devs included.
I really hope AI and the like push game devs out of big businesses and into self employment. Of all the types of people, I want problem solvers to have that life the most.
AI is still pretty bad at writing code, and often makes up API calls that dont exist. I wouldnt get your hopes up just yet.
Oh I’m aware haha. However I do wanna point out how much of an improvement gpt4 is compared to 3.5. The improvements have been pretty awesome imo even if they do tweak the ways you have to word things.
Ik a lot of people bitch and moan about how bad it is but I’ve had nothing but luck after pivoting around and wording things differently, following different techniques. But I get not everyone likes adapting so much so it’s fine ig.
As far as coding goes though I’m not mad about it being ass. That’s prolly the last part we should get working real well considering the implications for abuse we face now without considering the ability for it to write infinite offspring… :)
Black mirror should do an entire season on AI imo I think it would fucking kill
.
You have completely misinterpreted what I said.
I specifically said self employed which does not mean:
Weirdo capitalist begone.
.
That’s all well and fine for free open source projects, but products that expect me to pay money for them need to pay contributors. I’m not donating my time and effort so that some shareholder can buy another yacht.
Right, the business side of things again
Totally agree. If it were just a down to devs and players as in open source projects, it’d be a much different story
Has been since Oblivion.
Morrowind has a massive unofficial patch/esp as well
Well, they do hire a ton of modders
Answer me this:
Is it helping tho? 😂
But are they hiring the right modders?
They hired multiple from the very impressive Fallout London project, and also hired Elianora to help out with the interiors and lighting in Starfield
So, yes.
They owe them quite a lot…
WHAT DID YOU SAY
Honestly, those Unofficial Patch mods for Skyrim and Fallout are amazing.
People actually need to stop doing Bethesda’s work for them. Release after release they just push out buggy and unfinished product and community fixes it for them while they somehow take credit. FO76 was a huge mess exactly because people couldn’t fix it. Bethesda is bad, and people need to see it as such. Paying full price for their products is downright insulting.
I think if they would just price the games more fairly and in accordance with how the game actually plays then that’d be a different story.
Why would they. Corporations are always most amount of money for least amount of work. Bethesda is lucky, people claim they love their games after community patches them. So they pay full price and never finish anything.
I’m amazed that Bethesda has one of the premier game developers in their stead in id Software and didn’t bother to just use their shit. Instead they actively chased their staff away.
Bethesda the publisher and Bethesda the developer are different things.
The publishing arm seemed to know what they were doing, certainly enough for MS to buy them.
The developing arm is nothing if not consistent. You know what you’re getting into. An RPG, with lots of character build possibilities (even if a particular build overpowered enough for 90% of players to accidentally stumble across it, like Skyrim’s stealth archer build), a handful of memorable NPCs, no real character development, so-so performance, and a shitload of bugs.
If people are still buying them and still not enjoying them I don’t know what to say. It’s like watching Fast and Furious 10, and going “well that’s fucking dumb”.
I saw the ending of the last F&F by mistake (they sold us tickets for a movie that started an hour later), and let me tell you - that was fucking dumb.
I watched the first one many years ago, which appeared to just be Ocean’s 11, but for people who think putting blue lights under your car makes it go faster.
Then I watched F&F9 on Netflix the other month. I don’t remember any of the plot. At one point a car did a Tarzan rope swing.
Oh god, what? I haven’t seen any since the first either, was the movie fun enough to make it worth watching the series of them?
Given that I remember none of it, I’ll give it a resounding no.
Save yourself many hours of wondering what the fuck you’re doing with your life and just watch that one scene on YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJibJZb4XXw
ID and Bethesda Softworks and both using different custom, proprietary engines. Retraining your entire studio on a new engine is extremely time consuming, especially if it’s a custom engine with limited learning materials, like ID tech. There’s a big cost/benefit analysis there, and frankly, if Bethesda ever did switch engines, I think they’d be more likely to go with Unreal for this reason. Current staff, and certainly new hires, are much more likely to be familiar with it.
I wish they had gone with Ue5. The game would look better and perform better.
Like in Immortals of Aveum? I really don’t think that a switch to Unreal is a one-cure-for-all.
I didnt suggest it was
Well the Creation Engine and the ID Tech Engine follow two completely different main goals: One is build for wide open spaces and exploration with real time physics while also guaranteeing mod support. The other is build for fast paced combat in closed level structures. And I think especially the mod support is important to Bethesda and its community. That’s also the reason why so many people stick to Minecraft java instead of the more performant bedrock edition.
Link to arntzen’s technical description. github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/…/1694
I’m so glad steam hired this guy cause if he was doing this sh*t to cover slack for Bethesda and the huge publishers all for just a personal side project I would lose any hope I had for humanity.
only issue I see with the game at the moment is that they did not use those fly/land/dock sequences to mask the loading times. I think that would enhance the experience a lot
Exactly it almost seems like that was the plan and then something went wrong and they couldn’t fix it in time
It really would have. Considering that my loading screens are scarcely longer than those sequences anyway it could have, should have been nearly seamless.
are you on pc? Normally my loading screens last about 2-3 seconds, which is really short and a reason that I dont mind them that much
I think that’s what he means, he could load faster if the animation didn’t exist and instead of using the time for the animation to load, you get the animation then a loading screen.
“I had to fix your shit in my shit because your shit was so fucked that it fucked my shit”
This is how games and drivers have been for decades.
There are huge teams at AMD and nVidia who’s job it is to fix shit game code in the drivers. That’s why (a) they’re massive and (b) you need new drivers all the time if you play new games.
I read an excellent post a while ago here, by Promit.
www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/…/5215019/
It’s interesting to see that in the 8 years since he wrote it, the SLI/Crossfire solution has simply been to completely abandon it, and that we still seem to be stuck in the same position for DX12. Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
Yes they do. We know they do because current gen consoles are frequently providing better fidelity and better stability than PC games. Not because PCs have inferior hardware. But because optimization is actually incredibly hard when your custom base is all running different hardware AND different drivers. So even when the hardware is “the same”, it’s not.
This has been true forever. It just took 30 years for high performance computing to be affordable enough to put in consoles. 30 years was a long time for PC gamers to feel superior. Now they enjoy humble pie and make comments like this on the internet to explain why things are so “bad”.
PC games are still great. Don’t let this bother you more than it should.
Lol
To attribute this most recent failure to an overabundance of hardware variety is a joke. This issue persists on all Nvidia and Intel cards. Why? Because it’s an oversight pertaining to one thing they all share in common: their shared interaction with DirectX.
Let me repeat myself for the people in the back. The number of items they had to account for with this failure is one. One API.
This sounds more like hardware manufacturers haven’t provided a good enough abstraction layer across their devices, or they did (vulkan) but everyone is just stuck on bad apis that don’t properly map to the abstractions for the hardware. Or even more likely the publishers cheaped out and pushed something to release when it wasn’t ready like they have been forever.
It’s also a lack of specialized talent. There’s lots of great “talent” at game devs and even middleware devs. There’s just not much great talent that deals with renderers and API development. The vast majority of devs just lean on the middleware developer to push out the renderer codebase. In a situation like Bethesda running their own studio engine, they just don’t have the right people for it. This plagued the 90’s when people were trying to code for Glide, OGL, DX5,6,7,8, and 9. Many studios folded because they couldn’t get their tech to work with hardware acceleration.
*for current wage
Excellent point.
Pc gaming is and forever will be way better then games on consoles.
Why?
I’ve 3 letters for you.
R G B
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
tbf pc gaming was always a fight for performance, I never felt superior back in the day fighting with qemm, irqs for the soundblaster or glide3d, it’s always had been a shitshow. It was a super shitshow in the nineties, it was a bit better in the zero’s and nowadays it again became a tad better.
But somehow I enjoyed that shitshow. Still do.
I’ll give a different perspective on what you said: dx12 basically moved half of the complexity that would normally be managed by a driver, to the game / engine dev, which already have too much stuff to do: making the game. The idea is that “the game dev knows best how to optimize for its specific usage” but in reality the game dev have no time to deal with hardware complexity and this is the result.
They released on two different platforms. PCs have so much variation in hardware, it’s not surprising there are issues with it.
It’s poorly optimized code, and the comments from the top brass has been “lol your PC sux” when they can’t even get it running right on their own hardware.
It’s not the variations of PC that’s the issue, it’s a design and quality control issue. Direct X and Vulkan are the bread and butter of PC gaming. Microsoft developed direct X to establish a common graphics framework for Windows and Microsoft game studio still fucked up working with it.
They could have picked Khronos’ APIs. They think they are smarter than everyone else including GPU developers.
This is just classic corpo shit, developing their own proprietary stuff when no one asked for it. Apple with Metal too. Then it falls on developers to write abstraction layers
As far as wedding vows go, they’re not the MOST romantic… 🤷
As far as I know that’s what graphics drivers do, like, all the time. Every major title is handled specifically. I am not a developer. I heard this from engine developers
I’ve not seen any performance issues or anything else I’d call for sure a bug in the few hours I’ve played…
i’ve only had one major bug where my game appears to be frozen but UI updates. pausing works too. hard to reproduce
Once every 20 or so times that I leave my inventory, my viewcone is placed inside of my weapon for half a second and then the game stutters and I pop back into my character’s head (I think the inventory screen may scale up weapons for display and it’s failing to undo that so quickly, but that may be completely false).
That, and one dialogue “loaded” instantly (it started the interaction but wasn’t prepared with the graphics) and displayed a black screen for the first half of the conversation. Oh, also, FSR is FSR and makes spaceship landings look terrible.
Those are the only notable graphics issues I’ve experienced aside from widespread poor performance, and they might not even be graphics issues. I mean, the game doesn’t run too great, but the core gameplay is definitely less buggy than FO4 or Skyrim at launch. I’m sad to hear people are having more serious graphical issues, especially Arc users.
I’ve got ~50 hrs in game.
I’ve had 1 full crash, and a good handful of NPCs running into walls or levitating through ceilings.
Performance is fine, I guess, but I got the game as part of a promotion while upgrading my graphics card so it had better be. I believe folks who say it runs like dog on hardware that’s only a couple years old. It’s apparently unplayable if installed on a hard disk instead of an SSD.
All in, it’s the smoothest Bethesda launch I’ve ever seen (I skipped fallout 4, maybe it was better IDK) but that’s honestly not saying much. It’s way better than cyberpunk was at launch.
Narrator: “It wasn’t”.
Typical Bugthesda. Am only wondering how did they get this big by only releasing buggy products. I can’t for the life of me remember a single product they have made that wasn’t buggy mess that community fixed for them time and time again without any compensation. Not only that community didn’t get any compensation, Bethesda tried to sell their work and pinch some more money.
Imo, despite the bugs and sometimes because of them, they’re really fun games.
Yet larian constantly gets free passes.
Any serious bitching about SF seems to me to be nitpicking from folks who were just looking to bitch at Bethesda. It’s a fantastic game with minor issues that are easily overlooked and don’t really affect the experience.
Because Larian is relatively small compared to Bethesda and the game exceeded the already high expectations, it’s a AAA D&D 5e game, which is something people were looking for for a long time. Larian deserves it, and they are actively fixing the game anyway. Bethesda has no excuses to be releasing games that have the types of bugs that they do after having such giant successes like Skyrim. They have the money.
Look I like the game so I’m not trying to say it’s bad in any way but you are just making excuses. Pent up demand doesn’t excuse the bugs. Fuck, they didn’t even need to develop the underlying systems, they already have 5e and the engines.
I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying that Larian deserves to get a free pass on this one for releasing a game that exceeded the already high expectations, not for the demand. And personally, I barely encoutered any bugs in a 90 hour long save…
As for them “already having 5e”, that’s true, but it’s a system that is rather complex and which only gets more complex with higher in-game levels and items which all slightly modify the game - which is easy on tabletop, but I can only imagine what a nightmare it must be to implement this in a computer game. And as far as I know, there aren’t any other computer games that truly implement 5e. Sure, there’s Solasta, but that’s highly modified.
As for the engine: I really don’t see it as a valid point, as they had to massively change and upgrade it between D:OS2 and BG3 anyway, it’s just too different.
I’m up to about 150 hours in BG3 and I don’t think I’ve seen a single bug.
I use a Mac and I’ve seen plenty, apart from us being forgotten and the release date pushed back silently twice. For me any dirt ground textures never render.
Larian does a much better job than any other studio, but I paid for the game to play in August at release with my friends, but then they silently dropped the release date and the only viable solution to playing was to pay for GeForce now and stream it.
I’d only be a little annoyed if they communicated their issues.
👌👍
BG3 was basically unplayable for us for about 2 weeks post 1.0
But also, we really wanted to only play co-op, and the bugs were mostly online related, which is arguably more forgivable.
But still, hard crashing or freezing every 15 minutes for one of the three of us sucked, and looking at support forums, wasn’t uncommon either.
I.e. graphics driver developer. Listen what he says, Bethesda, not many driver developers will point out where gavemdevs act stupid.
I love the bitching and whining over minor shit while BG3 gets a free pass for a massively buggy game 🤣
Is poor game optimisation a minor detail?
Yes, have you even played bg3? It stutters way way more and is plenty enjoyable. They both did a mid tier job of optimization.
I’m convinced large video game publishers make deals with graphics card manufacturers to force the end user to upgrade, the AMD and Nvidia deals are not for free access to new technology it’s for which ever bids the highest price to sell more cards. There is little progression in graphics fidelity since 2016. We used to take giant leaps and now we take small insignificant steps.
Fidelity is always going to have diminishing returns. Perhaps there’s something fishy going on in the video card business, I don’t know that, but as someone who works in CGI, the evolution we see year after year makes sense, it’s not like there’s a hidden untapped potential
I’m not sure if it’s such a direct conspiracy, but I’m sure some of this happens inadvertently at least. Developers of big budget games are likely going to target higher end hardware, and API usage that might cause problems on lower end hardware probably sneaks in as a result of that. I’m sure there’s some deals between game studios and Nvidia / AMD to get the latest GPUs for workstations at some discount, which probably means the machines they’re using for the bulk of development are beefier than the average consumer’s (you also probably want a bit of headroom while developing)… But this kind of stuff can naturally lead to higher requirements for software because you don’t run into performance issues unless you’re very serious about testing on lower end hardware… Which you might care about to some extent, but it’s an additional cost that can take away from other aspects of the game, which might make it less marketable (graphics are a big deal for marketing, for example).
Obviously it’s not great if a game uses API calls inefficiently and that means it runs worse than it would otherwise… But I’m not really that surprised when it happens? Working on big projects on deadlines there’s often a “try the obvious solution, worry later if it’s too slow” mentality, and I’m not sure you need any more of a conspiracy than that to account for stuff like this.