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Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases
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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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The performance issues are a major one for me, nothing worse than firing up a new game and getting 40fps with tons of stuttering along the way.
I feel like most newer games also have trouble with low/medium settings not really being that much better for performance, so there's no fix for it.
I remember older games where low was like staring at a character made from 12 polygons and everything looked awful, but it would run on just about anything.
Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.
They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don't.
A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?
Yeah, they're now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.
Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.
Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and on one level, I don't blame them, it is absurdly complex.
Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics... while also being more performant, running on older hardware.
Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you're not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.
EDIT: 12 polygons you say?
Runs on anything, you say?
... ok, hear me out:
What if there is more to a video game than just how graphically realistic it is... what if it could be immersive, convincing, memorable, complex, not totally railroad you through a blatently OP power fantasy, linear story, even make the player really think about some real world serious shit, while also having a bit of goofy levity from time to time?
Man if there was a game like that, you'd have to reinstall it or something, sheesh.
(This entire game fits on a single CD ROM, btw, less than 750 MB)
While I have no love for a lot of modern AAA devs, Threat Interactive is not an authority on whatever he preaches. No games shipped, only some UE5 snake oil config files. No proof of any experience or credibility, just bashing. I wouldn't watch that stuff or bring it up as some sort of authority on 3D graphics.
Well, I also tinker with being a game dev, haven't shipped anything yet, but I find his technical breakdowns comprehensive and enlightening, as far as it goes with render pipeline analysis.
Its also not just bashing.
As I said, he goes out of his way to showcase examples of better ways to do things, he finds rather rare or seldom used rendering techniques, and will do a whole breakdown of why he thinks these alternatives should be used instead.
His whole video on normal aware anti aliasing was fascinating.
He is suggesting superior solutions, not just criticizing poor ones.
If you can watch one of his hour long analysis videos and not think that they show any experience whennit comes to comparing, contrasting, and optimizing render pipelines, then frankly, I don't think you're qualified to have an opinion, as the breadth, and level of detail he goes into is superior to many others in the industry, and showcases itself.
I'm not saying he's some kind of perfect game dev... there's a lot more to being a game dev than optimizing render pipelines... but within that subset of game dev, I think he knows what he's talking about.
Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn't worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn't any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.
I watch a good deal of his stuff on YT, and despite being I think roughly 20 years younger than him, I agree with his level of shock.
I used to work for Microsoft.
I have worked in varying different kinds of software dev, and have been making mods for games basically since I became a teenager.
... Almost no one optimizes anything these days, in my experience, be it a video game, a database or complex SQL query, ... etc etc.
Most people seem to just be adding technical debt with reckless abandon, and its because management prioritizes slapdash, good enough solutions, over an actually maintainable and performant system.
This is a huge part of why Windows is a bloated pile of nonsense, which they think they can now fix with even more bloated nonsense ('Copilot').
Tech company managent and C Suite are basically cult members/leaders at this point, and their insanity is literally destroying the world, now that they think they can more or less build their idea of God, if only they can use all the economic capital in existence.
They're insane.