Quote:The PC version of Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 is shamefully based on the last-generation consoles edition and looks a complete shambles. Comparison images via NeoGAF, illustrates how the game on PC is lacking in sharpness, features blurry low-quality textures and contains a terrible lighting system. Not only that, PES 2016 doesn’t support resolutions above 25601600, only had 3 graphics settings and unbelievably, the roster has only been partially updated. Furthermore, the promotional screenshots on Steam are from the superior-looking PlayStation 4 version.

(04-17-2016, 11:19 PM)SteelCrysis Wrote: And now multi-GPU doesn't work for Quantum Break: http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/quantum-break-will-not-support-multi-gpus.html

(04-18-2016, 05:11 PM)RolloTheGreat Wrote: I don't agree that PC gaming is second class though, it's a bigger market than PS4 and Xbox One together.

Quote:Any (graphically demanding) PC game worthy of the name should have the option for an uncapped framerate. Mafia 3 failed this test at launch, but a patch released just a few days later addressed this shortcoming. That of course raises an important question: If the framerate cap could be patched out in just a couple of days of fixing and testing, why was it there in the first place!? It speaks volumes that 2K Games ever thought having a cap on PC was acceptable.
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So how does the game run? Not so great. I can confirm that the game will struggle to hit 60 fps even on high-end hardware, at least if you want to run at the high preset. My test sequence consists of running around the city a bit, climbing into a car, and then driving along a set path. Indoor areas aren't as demanding, but a large portion of the game is spent in the city, and that's where players are most likely to encounter choppiness.

Digging into the specifics, I measured average frame rates of just 41 fps on a GTX 1070 at 1440p high—and 4K high cuts that nearly in half. Even at 1080p high, the 1070 only managed 53 fps, while 1080p medium bumped that up to 70 fps, and 1080p low yielded 100 fps. If you have lesser hardware, like a GTX 960 or R9 380, prepare for the worst if you want 60+ fps. A GTX 960 4GB card (R9 380 4GB was similar) scored 50 fps at 1080p low, and that dropped to 32 fps at medium and 24 fps at high.

You want 60+ fps? 1366x768 low got me there, but that's really hitting the bottom of the barrel. Ugh. RX 480 and GTX 1060 let you run 1080p low at around 70 fps, and the R9 390 and GTX 980 should come in at this level as well. Yeah—a GTX 980 is going to need to run the low preset (or turn antialiasing, reflections, and volumetric effects to low) to hit 60 fps.

I did a bit of poking around with CPU testing as well, just for good measure. My default configuration is a six-core i7-5930K at 4.2GHz; disabling four of the cores and running as a dual-core 4.2GHz part only dropped the GTX 960 about 10 percent at 1080p low, and 1080p high showed no difference. Faster GPUs are a different matter, however, with the GTX 1070 dropping down to 55 fps at 1080p low and 44 fps at 1080p high. Running a quad-core CPU mostly makes up for the deficit, but clock speed is still moderately important. Regardless, you're not going to hit silky smooth 60+ fps framerates at 1080p high with anything short of top-end hardware like the GTX 1080.

Final analysis and parting shots

So where did things go wrong? New Bordeaux to my eye doesn't look any better than Los Santos from GTA5, but performance is substantially lower—you can run 4K very high settings with 4xMSAA in GTA5 and get similar performance to 1080p high in Mafia 3.

Part of the difference may be in rendering effects that don't necessarily have a massive impact on visual quality but cause a big hit to performance, but that doesn't seem to be the only factor. Durante wrote recently about what 'optimization' really means, and why it's not always accurate to label a game as poorly optimized if it's simply a few specific settings that tank performance—and for valid reasons.

Volumetric effects and things like contact hardening shadows, screenspace reflections, antialiasing, and more can be seriously demanding. But while Mafia 3 is doing many of those items, it's not doing them particularly well—just look at this shot of Lincoln standing under a streetlight. During the daytime things seem to go better, but even then I still have to go back to that other open-world game, GTA5, and ask why this game is so much more taxing on hardware.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is another recent game that can eat graphics cards for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and come away still hungry. Unlike Mafia 3, it includes many more options to tweak, and the default 'medium' setting is arguably better than Mafia 3's 'high' option. Turn DXMD to 'ultra' and there aren't many PCs equipped to handle the workload, at least not yet. But in that game, I can point to various features and know why they kill performance for only a moderate improvement in visual fidelity. With Mafia 3, the answers are far less certain.

Going back to the original 30 fps cap, the most likely explanation in my mind is that the game and engine were built to achieve that modest (sluggish) goal, and not much more. The CPUs and GPUs I tested are far beyond the PS4 and Xbox One hardware, and even if the low preset does correlate to console settings, the resulting performance is still sketchy at best. The game engine (and story and mechanics, but that's another topic) needs a serious overhaul. To me, it feels like this is less of a badly optimized port and more of a poorly optimized game in the first place.

Quote:That’s the situation we find ourselves in with Dishonored 2, a game that’s being praised for its mechanics, its gameplay, and its story — on consoles. On PCs, frame rate stutters, crashes, and other problems are killing gamer opinion. Reviewers who have the console version have praised it to the heavens, while reviewers with the PC version have been reporting dropped frame rates to the point that it’s making some people seasick, even on advanced rigs. Pascal GPUs like the GTX 1080 can’t hold a stable frame rate, even with detail levels set to medium at 1920×1080, while reviewers with AMD solutions are reporting feeling seasick if they increase detail levels above Medium, even with GPUs like the R9 Nano.
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So yeah. I love Dishonored, and by all accounts Dishonored 2 is a great game on consoles. But once again, it’s a great game that someone thought it was okay to push out in a substandard state on PCs. And to be utterly honest, I’m getting pretty tired of that. For as long as PC games have existed, there have been terrible PC games — but the advent of consoles that were so close to PCs was supposed to make it easier to port titles and play games across all three platforms. It hasn’t. Nobody could figure out why Bethesda changed its review policy right ahead of Skyrim, but it makes perfect sense now.

Why is it that a console with seven available CPU cores based on a budget CPU design that’s now four years old and a midrange AMD GPU of the same age can play a game beautifully, while PC players with vastly more powerful hardware experience the visual equivalent of a dumpster fire? I’m tired of writing articles about how gorgeous games that run well on console hardware need several months of patches (or $3,000 in PC equipment) to run comparably. I’m tired of writing articles about how the Windows Store version of a game is garbage, or how a brand-new, cutting-edge title doesn’t run well. I’m tired of cataloging a litany of issues, some of which are related to the complexity of modern titles and architectures, and some of which are caused by publishers either farming out the PC port to a small studio that isn’t properly integrated and can’t do the job properly, or simply not caring because they want to hit a launch window.

If you want to push back against this trend, stop pre-ordering games. Stop buying half-baked titles just because they’re from a franchise you’ve enjoyed. Wait until the game is fixed — and if the game never gets fixed, find something else to play. God knows, there are enough excellent games on the market to keep us all busy for decades, especially if you’re willing to dip into back catalogs and play older titles.

And no, Bethesda — Dishonored 2 is, I’m certain, not the most egregious PC failure of the year. In fact, compared with titles like Gears of War Ultimate Edition, I’m certain it’s not even close. But given that you killed your review policy a few weeks back, and given the overall level of crap we’ve gotten this console generation, I’m through putting up with it. Shipping an amazing Doom update doesn’t get you a free pass, and if you can’t be bothered to ship a title that’s been optimized for PC hardware less than six months old, don’t bother shipping it at all.