Why PC Game Ports STILL Suck
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2022
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Consoles are more similar to PCs than ever before, but many games designed for console still suffer from performance and technical issues when they're ported over to PCs. Why does this happen?
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I love that we can hear Riley yelling in the background
Okay, so I’m not going crazy than. I kept stopping the video and pulling out my earbuds to see if someone was yelling at me.
XD absolute mad lad
Lol he is trolling us 😂
I was getting super annoyed by the background chatter, so I paused the video, scroll down, and see "we can hear Riley". Oh well, if it's just Riley I guess it's okay then.
I thought I was going crazy in my own house. Thank you for acknowledging this.
Another big problem with PC ports is not even trying to adapt the console UI to PC.
Console ports of PC games happens the same thing due the limited button combinations or lack of mouse input.
why do you think i use skyui, better messagebox controls & better dialogue controls every time i play skyrim it is clearly a console game ported to pc
Halo Infinite UIs literally feels like its for console only
they did just look at steam
@@TheTroller911 the optimization is terrible on PC, I'm barely getting 100 fps a lot of the time with my rig with an rtx 3070 and Ryzen 5 5600x on 1080p high setting s
Am I the only one that heard people playing in the background? There was so much going on in the background, I'm wearing ear buds and dang if it didn't feel like someone was playing the next room over.
Nah I heard it.
It’s Riley recording for TechLinked
It's just the good old schizophrenia playing its pranks again.
Techlinked with Riley...
Riley is now living rent free in your brain
it all depends on developers actually using the tools available.
and for a good sized team to be doing ports.
so many ports are just done with too few people.
True
You don't need a lot of people if you planned for the PC version early enough.
Almost all the issues Linus mentioned are problems related to game being first made for a console, then optimized for a console, and then ported to PC.
If you start porting the game before its optimized for consoles, or even better, start developing for both platforms from the very beginning, then you will not have those issues.
so many ports are just a literal copy/paste of the console limited game code.
or they just didn't interested releasing a pc version for their game, I know a visual novel developer that releasing their game for switch, ps4, and ps5, the original game was developed on the PC version, and they spends around 2 years just to port the game to that console, and didn't even bother releasing their game to the PC, when he's being interviewed? he's answered that he wanted to have a english version of the game if it's being released on steam and wanted to wait for that to happened, but I and the game fanbase knows that's just bullshite
@@hubertnnn ah yes like what Microsoft did with Minecraft except the Java is by itself
Fun fact: Unified memory architecture in consoles started with the Nintendo 64. A whopping 4 MB of Rambus RDRAM.
PS3 also had unified memory, sadly, it wasn't enough, still we had the miracle of The Last of Us (the anomaly of the CELL processor also helped).
@@saricubra2867 The PS3 famously did not have unified memory - it was split into 256MB of system and 256MB of graphics RAM. I say 'famously' because its counterpart, the Xbox 360, _did_ have unified memory and that played a part (alongside the Cell of course) in why development for the PS3 was considered so difficult. Sony never made the same mistake again - all their consoles since then have been very straightforward and flexible designs, and _much_ easier to develop for.
4MB? That oughtta be enough for anybody!
@@KillahMate Always found the 360 better at gaming on purely because if the game was less visually intensive but moreso on the system, the VRAM could be as small as it needs to be to give the system more head room, even older games like Sonic Adventure 2 Battle had lag on the PS3 at times, in my case anyway.
You expand it to 8MB even!
I follow LTT since 2017 and this video kinda brought me to the older videos, with less memes and more technical content.
Not that I'm complaining about the new standard in the main channel, but videos like this one were what made me fall in love with your channel and I hope you keep posting them here in Techquickie at least.
Thanks!
Agreed. This is actually interesting content IMO.
Main channel is clickbait trash
Been a fan since 2014 and can agree but still love the production quality of new ltt
I've been watching since this channel had plain white backgrounds lol. The current vids are nice to watch but doesn't stand out like it used to.
Real
Hearing other employees yelling in the background (around 3:05) is weird, but I guess it adds life to the video.
Don’t worry, it’s just Riley.
I found the entire BGM annoying as hell in this vid. Sounded like someone listening to EDM in a car outside.
@@ashawesome7234 Funny how it easy it was to identify Riley's voice from the background.
2:27 flash backs to apartment life, **indistinct yelling through the walls.**
I'm willing to forgive graphical glitches and FPS stutters in a PC port. What is unforgiveable is when they don't offer remappable controls. If your PC game, port or otherwise, doesn't offer remappable controls, it's broken and you should be shunned.
SHAME! *ding ding* SHAME! *ding ding*
I mean if you're playing on steam you can remap through steam even if it's not a steam game you can add the file to your library and remap it that way
True
They should allow remapping on every system the game is on same with choosing to take a dip in graphics for frames.
@@jt3000o
Unfortunately, that's only a half-measure that uses Steam to trick the game into thinking you pressed another button. A lot of console games are designed with the idea that players only have 16 or so buttons to press, and as such, many commands are over-lapped and change what a button does based on specific contexts. This isn't an issue when you're dealing with a controller that gives you 4 buttons for the left thumb, 4 buttons for the right thumb, 4 buttons on the top of the controller, plus 2 joysticks and additional buttons for "Pause" and "Back" because everything is laid out with the ergonomics of the controller in mind.
It becomes a problem when playing on PC, however, because often times you'll want a specific key to do a specific action and to rebind different things to different keys for the most comfortable experience for that given user. Ideally, one would want every game to use the same control layout for similar functions (like "E" for interact, L Shift for Sprint, etc) to prevent players from getting confused when jumping between different games and genres.
This also doesn't get into the issue that many older console-based games just don't have ergonomic control layouts at all (like the PS1 era titles that didn't take joysticks into account and expect you to control the camera with the shoulder buttons on a controller or the numberpad on a keyboard). I can't play games like Zone of the Enders HD no matter how many times I try because none of the controls are where they would reasonably be expected to be (like putting the "ascend/descend" functions on the face buttons rather than the shoulder buttons like every other mecha game, or putting the "dash" button on the trigger behind the "guard" button, instead of either of those functions being on the face buttons). Worse still, on PC, there's no option to change the controls at all... And the PC controls aren't presented to the player anywhere in the game. You're expected to use a controller every time you play that game... But again, the control layout isn't remotely ergonomic.
The biggest issue with PC gaming is that they don't even try. Even "good" ports are dumped with DRM that drag performance down. Technical issues can be fixed. The way companies think is way harder to change.
DRM is kind of a double edged sword. Say what you will about how companies think, it's an issue that involves both sides of the fence needing to re-evaluate how they do things.
Because there is no oversight and no acceptance process. Console games have to be submitted to the platform holder for review and quality assurance. If they don't meet a specific standard they are not allowed to release on that platform. On PC you can release any junk and there is no one to stop you.
@@RippahRooJizah DRM is not a double edged sword, they don't work and waste resources.
The record for the longest uncracked DRM was a bit more than a month, where most of them get cracked in 2 or 3 days.
So you end up with still cracked games and annoyed customers, since some games have so bad DRMs that people crack legally owned games to make them run better.
I still remember a game called "Soldiers, Heroes of World War II". Its DRM required the game to scan the CD for 30 minutes when the game was launching.
Obviously i decided to crack it so I won't need to wait for that stupid DRM.
@@RippahRooJizah really just a single edged sword. DRMs can almost always be circumvented. So they don't prevent piracy. They just harm the paying customers.
Its the same with other forms of media. UHD blu-ray for example, on PC required specific Intel CPUs, windows 10, a compatible motherboard, optical drive, GPU, and display. For a few months. Until HT enthusiasts figured out they could take standard blu-rayXL drives, and make a slight change to the firmware that caused the drive to entirely ignore the DRM as well as region locks. Making its legitimately easier and cheaper to watch UHD Blu-ray illegally, than it was to do it the way the DRMs wanted
@@kusayfarhan9943 To be fair you can release junk on consoles as well. But, yeah, easier to do on PC.
Love the collaboration with the fine folks over at DF !!!
Kudos to Alex und Auf Wiedersehen!
the background noise :D LTT is haunted
It’s just Riley recording for TechLinked
It's 2023 May 30th. Holy shit LTT could NOT have predicted the shitshow of terrible PC ports in 2022 to now.
honestly for games like Horizon Zero Dawn I can understand that an engine probably almost exclusively built for the PS systems doesn't run too well on pc.
but you need to seriously cripple the engine if you can't get Unreal to run on a PC.
a lot of these points sounds like devs are manually going into the level hand changing values for assets and that might not be entirely wrong if they were trying to get every bit of performance out of it but most of the time I'm sure it's just some config settings for render distances LODs, texture streaming pools and different compression settings for textures. Stuff you can change easily if you want to without having to remake the entire game
so more than anything i feel like they don't want to invest the time and budget necessary to make a good port because modern pcs are so strong they can just brute force through many of the issues that devs could resolve if they were allowed to.
Death Stranding was ported to pc before HZD and that used the same engine.
@@jk563 yepp, and apparently people that dug into HZD's major patches that fixed msot of the issues found that a lot of the fixes were basically stuff already done for DS, whjch for some reasons weren't applied to HZD's port in the first place.
@@jk563 however Kojima studios knew from the beginning they are releasing a PC version and started to work on the Decima engine for the pc version.
Its probably why we got DLSS in HZD after Sony bought Nixxes, they are getting features into the engine for future PC titles, that may have been on the Nvidia leak
Edit: Or they are at least using the tech to gain experience implementing it in a released game, so that the next game can use it properly
Horizon just had a huge update dec7 the new shader compilation on the fly with dlss and multithreading utilization is on point, probably one of the best optimized games out there now.
Always glad when you guys work with Digital Foundry. They are AMAZING at what they do and they really know their stuff, especially Alex with his crazy in-depth knowledge of Ray Tracing.
It's not hard to read an entire wikipedia page.
@@BenderBendingRodriguezOFFICIAL what does that even mean
@@BenderBendingRodriguezOFFICIAL you people just want to hate no matter what huh?
@@shayan9571 no I love to point out fact.
Get it straight.
@@BenderBendingRodriguezOFFICIAL Exactly.
What prevents an initial setup from taking the time to compile shaders?
well you see that would take a small amount of effort and doesn't make them money so they don't bother
That would take hours of simulating the game's environments to precompile the entire shader cache.
While it's possible to do that, it doesn't offer many benefits.
Some shaders are precompiled and cached already, where applicable - Steam especially provides many precompiled shaders as part of the download.
But fundamentally, shaders are a lot more dynamic 'on bare metal', such as in consoles, and need to be made static to be put into a cache.
It's not only caching the shader, but also all its variations when interacting with other shaders. It's a task that can be more expansive than one could imagine.
Nothing but time implementing the feature. Call of duty modern warfare 2019 compiles shaders while you wait in the menus and as a result has almost no stutters. It got worse as time went on though.
I know I've seen some games that precompile shaders either at first boot-up or early on in the initial playthrough. The big problem is that it often introduces a rather lengthy initial load time that may be undesirable for some. In other words, do you want to stare at a loading screen for a few minutes or play your game with a bit of stutter for a bit?
One interesting side note is that emulators have had to deal with this problem too. As noted in the video, console games typically come with shaders precompiled for the console hardware, but that doesn't work with a PC. As a result, the shaders need to be compiled for the host PC running the emulation, and in the past, that resulted in stutters like you saw in the video. However, emulation groups have done *A LOT* of work to reduce that, and from what I recall seeing in videos discussing the changes, it's significantly better.
@@pie75 Consoles hardly run on bare metal, especially Xbox that runs a version of Windows. What they run on is a very limited set of hardware, which actually makes them more static than on what we call PCs.
BTW, it doesn't take hours to precompile shaders unless you're trying to run max settings on a potato.
TLDR: Humans are the weak link. As with almost all tech issues: it all comes down to a short term desire to not spend money that prevents people from making much more later down the line. Funny how Doom is a cultural touchstone in major part because it was written so effectively that it's been ported to run on practically everything & anything with a screen.
not humans. capitalism.
the corporate leadership looking for a quick buck.
you think the devs want to see a project they poured themselves into over several years of hard work to run like shit? It's not up to them.
@@maxmustsleep The thing is, As you say games are years in the works, And it's common for games to be delayed.. On more than one occasion, As much as by another year or even two, While they sort issues out... Yet when released they still end up running like shit due to bad optimization lol
@@danimayb that's a different topic though. at the point we're talking about there already is a working version of the game that is optimized for at least one platform that's getting ever closer to a regular pc architecture. I'm not saying its easy to port it but most engines already support multi platform features.
It's not like the devs cant undo some of the limitations they forced onto the game, its just that they don't get the necessary resources to do so and to thoroughly test it because it'll run "well enough"
@@maxmustsleep Exactly! Capitalism ruins gaming in multiple ways but for some reason most people fail to see the connection.
Thing is games like doom have a way higher demographic on pc since doom has always been a series for the pc. Where as final fantasy 7 games have always been made with Playstation in mind.
Steam for example has a big inventory of hardware data - would it be possible for developers to use that data to work out an average pc configuration and develop a stable codec for ports. Something along the lines of DLSS conceptually?
2:30 Riley at the back.. "NO WAY" haha
Yeah, constant noises in the back, like they couldn't care less about recording this video.
@@xMdb cry
I had a momentary confusion. Ports as in ports of games. My first thought was ports as in peripheral ports 😂
I read Portal instead of port.
That's really funny and quirky and totally not forced.
I actually had exactly the same thought. In my head, Game Port still refers to the 15 pin joystick port.
hate the stuff , don't like sherry either !
I had the same confusion also.
Laziness in software creation is a common blight nowadays. Once the PC became the superpowerful, number crunching behemoth, coders got lazy. Little code optimisation and graceful code, just pure grunt. Well it has come back and bit them now. God help that they have to re-engineer something for a port. I know its not the same - but get the guys that did Sonic on the C64 or Quake on the Amiga to port them. :)
So I agree but I think video games are different than software.
In the sense that a software company will have a certain quality standard required for optimization.
Video game publishers own the studios they release for, and the time crunch required strips a lot of the technical engine and low level work off to make it for release.
So long as publishers attitudes don't change, there simply won't be enough time to optimize AAA games properly anymore. It's too profit driven.
This statement isn't very fair to the poor coding slaves working at game studios these days.
Back in the day a cross-platform port often meant a near 100% rewrite because there wasn't much to port. Vastly different graphics and sound capabilities, very different architectures, storage formats, RAM sizes, … Also, the games were small enough to be fully understood by a small handful of people so we could afford to write elegant, magic, hacky, whatever code as long as it performed well.
Today, with hundreds of on-the-spot-replaceable coding drones on a project, readability and maintainability is key, performance let alone elegance be damned. Hardware is cheaper than manpower, especially when it's the customer paying for the hardware anyway. Also, code is often structured the way it is so that you can "just" build the same codebase for a variety of systems. This means you're building the greatest common denominator for all systems instead of the best you possibly can for each supported system. Consequently, a game that will run fine on the clearly defined hardware specs of a given console may or may not run as fine on a PC with whatever combination of parts the gamer happened to plug in there.
Also, lazy ports have been around forever and you know it. Why utilize a C128's extra memory when the C64 version will run? Why use the Amiga's custom chips when the CPU is the same as in the ST? Support a second disk drive let alone hard drive installation? Naah. NES to SNES ports, the various Atari consoles, all the same across the board. There were SO many mediocre-at-best games that could have been great if only they had properly used the hardware at hand.
One of the things I love about retro-dev (NES, GB, Megadrive, etc) is just how much simpler it can be. While I'll defend development Vulkan for not being nearly as hard as people grumble it is, I've also written several games for retro platforms that contain fewer lines of code (C and assembly) than my entire Vk renderer. The problem is that hardware has gotten exponentially more complicated, and the "rules" change every few years. Trust me, it's not that the software devs don't want their ports to be better, but that it can end up just being too expensive to "do them right" without a fairly major rewrite. It doesn't work to just throw more devs at a problem, and it ends up being both a time AND money problem. The devs usually don't have much say in either.
Sounds like you need to go research a tiny bit about game development, or software development in general, or heck, even some basic business before you go and comment something this stupid ever again.
The way he pronunced Battaglia made me weep.
love it.
Yeah, my Italian ears hurt so much... ;)
Why can you hear the team screaming in the background xD (2:11)
It’s Riley recording a cideo for TechLinked next to them
5:58 - "takes care of most things automagically" 😂
Thinking a bit laterally, would having some sort of benchmark that gets run before actually playing the game tests all these different variables which then would allow how the shader is done or a set of pre-defined shader tables get selected based on the benchmark?
idk what video riley was working on in the background but it sounds lit
TechLinked
Is it normal for Techquickie videos to have voices / laughter in the background (for instance at 2:10)? I find them very distracting...
No, it’s not normal.
But it’s Riley, so nothing is out of the ordinary.
DirectX shaders compile into a bytecode ASM lang that each GPU driver consumes (this has been true since at least D3D9 & I think same is true for D3D8 ASM shaders).
D3D doesn't need you to re-compile shaders but OpenGL does (so IDK what he is saying unless consoles use machine-code shaders).
Vulkan FINALLY has a D3D like shader bytecode (why GL didn't have this god only knows).
Also for PC, games could just release textures with less zip like compression or compress texture & mesh resources into formats that can be decompressed with multiple threads very easy. Because both texture & mesh data if very linear data, it can be broken up into parts for multi-threaded decompression then re-constructed extremely fast.
Sad truth is most game engines don't design many parts under the hood correctly leading to dependency hell holes no one wants to fix.
I think what they're referring to is exactly what you said, they use machine-code shaders specifically in the language for the console.
This is why the HLSL compiler for D3D9 on PC and 360 produce different results. For example, the 360 version outputs direct machine code for the GPU (R500 i think?) whereas PC has an another middleman D3D9 ASM bytecode which is ingested by the driver and then translated to the machine code for the chip you're running (and stored in the cache).
I don't know much about modern shaders or materials, but if it's possible, I think the simplest solution would be to precache them all when the game starts for a smooth experience. It all depends on the rendering engine, of course and AFAIK some games already do this.
As for textures, I guess pre-tiling them correctly could solve the compression issue, along with actually using DXT compression and not leaving everything in raw XRGB/ARGB/RGBA formats. But that has its own set of problems because each GPU tiles the textures in their own way.
@@xan1242 Most games on PC will just choose a texture format that works across all vendors even if its less optimized. The issue with shipping raw RGBA formats then processing them into the best format is sometimes those compression tools are proprietary and maybe can't be shipped under normal licenses. Plus it takes a really long time to do.
On Android you can ship multiple versions of your game each with a different texture formats so it runs best on different phone GPUs without causing app bloat. On PC the best option really is just to ship the best formats for Intel, Nvidia & AMD. Which might cause bloat but offer better performance. Steam should offer an option to devs that allow them to ship multiple versions of a game the user can select from when downloading.
The last sentence is software in general (looking at you windows).
This was really informative! Great explanations
Regarding shader compilation, DX12 seems to alleviate this with new pre-compilation tools
DX12 games tend to be worse about stutter. Also some games overcomplicate the shader process. Cod Cold War was a example of that. It had 8+ Gb's of shaders it would compile every time you installed a new driver. I haven't played any of the cods using the new engine but I hope they don't have to do that. Also the fact that these shaders are stored on the windows drive makes things annoying.
This isn't true. I've been using D3D9,10,11 & 12 and all APIs use the same kind of pre-compiled shader bytecode system which is then consumed by the driver into machine-code.
OpenGL is the only API where this compilation stuff is an issue (as it compiles from source code) & Vulkan added bytecode ASM support like D3D has had for decades.
So shader stutters happen when you're playing the game as your PC suddenly gets busy re-compiling those shaders. Is there a good reason why this re-compiling isn't done when you launch the game ? Why does it need to occur while you're actually playing ? Even with old DirectX 11, this could be done beforehand while loading the game, right ?
@@AdriMul Depends. If a game is well optimized it can be compiled at loading time, or even better during gameplay as a background task.
But if you have tons of shaders like someone mentioned Cod having 9GB then it would possibly take minutes if not hours of loading time.
You could still compile them in background, but that requires planing.
@@hubertnnn thanks for the insight :-)
Interestingly, there are quite a number of games using Direct3D 11 or earlier that actually run faster through Proton on Linux because the wrapper, DXVK, uses Vulkan (which is more like Direct3D 12). On the other hand, most Direct3D 12 titles take some kind of a performance hit running through Proton because the VKD3D wrapper for Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation does not improve on GPU efficiency by using Vulkan over something that is more like it in the first place, Direct3D 12.
I bumped the volume up and I think I can literally hear Riley yelling in the background at the beginning of the video, maybe recording TechLinked, what was going on there?
2:04 I can hear Riley's loud laughs.
Nice way to say that in many cases companies don’t take the time to make proper PC ports. Somehow some games can make it, some can’t….. hmmm Also in many cases they don’t bother with a proper controlling scheme on PC, like Dying Light 2 (hard locked keys, many functions not listed in rebind list, even after rebind, only the original key works, no mouse 4-5 support)
Mostly because PC is seen as second class due to more people being on console
Thank you for this! Been saying this for a few years now, ever since I had a large pool of ddr3 ram and kept having issues with unreal 4 streaming... Once I had window's memory management reconfigured to actually use the ram, rather than trying to back and forth between a hard drive and compression on a normal operations basis, been like night and day... During this, and after, went down the whole rabbit hole about how the game's were using the memory, that pipeline and how to optimize it on both windows and game end, and for the games that don't allow, just the windows factor alone was still enough to make a significant difference... Been trying to explain how this works to so many people, specially with older hardware and how this can cause issues...
Thank you for this one, now I can point to a wonderfully comprehensive explanation from a trusted source, cause they sure as hell weren't listening to me lol...
Not sure what your trying to explain but it this the console command variables.
R.Streaming.PoolSize or loading all textures into system ram or vram allocation?
@@TRONiX404 actually yeah, in part.. not on the Windows side though, that's more to do with the paging file, it as in you don't want it but you have to have it cuz programs won't run without it for some reason.. but you got to get that on your fastest drive and off of your main OS drive, then you got to make sure that ram doesn't compress in Windows because that's going to eat resources ended up itself especially on older ram which was one of my issues, older Rams older CPU.. it's x79 so it's it's still you know pretty solid as it turns out, had no idea they were xeons that just got surplus or something like that for the what can we squeeze out right now right before the next generation of ram modules come into fruition and we have a new architecture.. turns out back in the day you might actually get something good as a result of that, they've they've fixed a lot of these problems lol hence the 11th generation Intel CPUs.
basically you don't want your computer to run like a cell phone if you want your computer to run with the maximum efficiency of its resources in singular tasks.. it's something that Windows just doesn't understand anymore it seems, but still has the capability to understand.. first thing is first go to your apps which are the cell phone version of programs apparently, turn off everything and make sure nothing runs in the background that's a huge step right there cuz that will constantly be loading in and out so it doesn't look like it's using obscene amounts of resources but it is using obscene amounts of resources LOL.
The next thing and this is pretty crucial especially for well pretty much any hard drive that you want to not die before it's time LOL and for any program that you want to use that you know Microsoft's algorithms haven't figured out LOL but you want to turn off the smart allocation program I can't remember what it's called they changed the name every once in a while.. it's essentially the program that organizes your hard drive and pre-allocates resources for the programs that you might want to use that it thinks you want to use more often.. and that preloads those it's fucking stupid but it actually does make sense from the stupid point of view especially in a OS environment right now that's trying to be a cell phone and run everything all at once all the time in the background lol..
like you'll hear this a lot, but whenever you run into like either an Android Simp and you're starting to see these on computers just in general.. which is just a bad sign all together, but you'll run into that person that's like any ram that's not being used is wasted ram.. yeah punch those people, don't even argue just punch em and walk away, pretty sure it's the only way that they're ever going to think about what they've done.. eventually hopefully, but you can't argue with them because it's just fundamentally not correct and requires basically the mindset of general use case which is not how computers work the best for individuals.. sure on a meta scale of all the computers, and all the use cases this is an optimal situation but that is not good we don't want that on your computer especially your personal computer LOL, especially if that doesn't align with the general use case scenario, which is most cases especially in gaming we are definitely not the general use case LOL.. Microsoft just doesn't want to let that one go, then you know what whatever as long as they keep the tools in that can fix that, it's just it is damaging their reputation of the operating system there is no fucking reason why it should run so many resources and be so system intensive, I know this because I've made it not do that and it doesn't need them LOL.. I'm pretty sure a lot of this is telling it telemetry based as well or is that just might be the side bonus that makes it so that it'll never change, it might not be the primary reason but it's sure nice that everything has a back end that's always running LOL.
when you say that consoles "usually" have something, do you mean this gen or also earlier generations (like x360)?
Really great video!
I primarly thought, that it is mostly cuz of the already existing reasons, of different hardware, plus a little resources used for porting.
Looks like I was (almost) wrong, though as someone said, it mostly depends on developers.
Thanks for the video!
Finally, I kept explaining these micro stutters on PC and most didn't even noticed they had. (Probably younger players). One of the reason I mostly gaming on my consoles rather on my beefy PCs
It's videos like this that make me question why my ancient AMD Phenom II X4 940 still gets 60fps in ESO (high)
MMORPGs don't really have a track record for being that demanding, especially on CPUs as most of the work is done by the GPU (unless you're playing on low settings that are usually tailored for computers integrated graphics). ESO's minimum requirements ask for a 2 core, 4 thread CPU from early 2010 (an intel i3 540) and it's recommended specs asking for a 4 core, 4 thread CPU from 2011 (an intel i-5 2300), it makes sense that a slightly older 4 core, 4 thread CPU would offer similar performance. Especially if your GPU is strong enough to render the game and still have some overhead
@@Madara8989 This isn't necessarily true actually. I don't know much about ESO but I know WoW is notorious for being CPU bound because aspects of its old engine are using the CPU to do things that should be tasked to the GPU but didn't make sense to when the Engine was architected. That said, MMOs are pretty low spec, in general, at this point. Even New World which is all of 6 months old barely looks better than ESO which is 8 years old.
Don't forget HDR... It's been 6 years and while high end PCs can basically run a console game at 'both graphics and performance mode' at the same time, we still dont get the colors and brightness console HDR has.
On the note of DX12 giving more granular control while DX11 handles more on its own, I have to wonder how hard it would really be to set these things up so that they can handle things on their own if you ask them to but also offer more granular control of if you want it
Video idea: History of PC ports (physical port ports, not game ports)
They've done some similar videos on this channel and either LTT or ShortCircuit has had a few videos on retro gaming that kind of brought a lesson on old ports with it.
PC Ports in 90s or 2000s are way worse than what we have now.
Somebody get Linus a tighter shirt.
Did they change the cameras again recently? It looks really good.
Two possible solutions, if either are possible or practical, would be to either code the games to load the necessary assets, in order of priority, up to the quantity that the hardware can accommodate which should help with utilizing more threads/RAM than the console would have, or an AI based algorithm to dynamically optimize the game, based on the specs of the PC, to improve performance and possibly accommodate hardware that would be able to run it, even if it wouldn't meet the specified minimum requirements like requiring a specific OS or higher, for example, unless there's a security threat and/or a known risk of physically compromising the hardware in some way.
I LOVE this Digital Foundry crossover! I really love Digital Foundry and both Richard, Alex, and John. So happy to see them on this channel. Never thought I would see them mentioned on a Linus video. AHHH this is awesome!
With certain parts that consoles have or how they handle things like files and such it made me realize that consoles are quite literally made for gaming. I feel like if gaming PCs used some of these same techniques and parts things might be easier but idrk. Consoles just seem effecient in how they handle games despite their limitations from a speed and power stand point
Rileys ghost voice from a different video is a real threat for the consumer here.
Oh that explains a LOT. I was playing Bus Simulator yesterday and even though my pc should be able to handle the graphics pretty well. (I have a 1660 Ti, a reasonable gpu) and my ssd and a mid tier cpu (I have a 3300x) should be handling the loading of new areas well, despite all this, I got a lot of stutters. I dialed everything gpu heavy down to low thinking it was that but it still kept stuttering everytime i discovered a new area. To the point where it was unplayable. I guess its one of those lazy ports.
Love the fine folks at DF! It'd be cool to see more collabs with them in other videos :)
FFVIIR doesn't make sense when it's a UE4 game, other games it's understandable.
What's even weirder about that game is that plenty of their other ports are much better. DQ 11, Kingdom Hearts 3, and Final Fantasy X, XII, and XV are all vastly superior PC ports overall even with the troubles the luminous engine has given Square. DQ 11 and Kingdom Hearts 3 are also UE4 so this whole situation is very strange
Yeah, if anything it should be easier to port to PC now as it's using a game engine that was built from the ground up on PC first.
@@neoasura right.
Script kiddies and interns made this game.
To distracted looking at panties mods.
I know there's a way to configure the CPU to cut down on the jitter and I know there is a PCI Express ram card that will help with gameplay but you have to configure it when you play a game by doing that you can get most of the jitter out of there sometimes there still will be jitter depending on how old your PC is
I sincerely hope the direct storage api will be taken full advantage of. I waited for it to be implemented ever since I bought an overpriced gpu. I hope it's not as slowly adapted as multi threading is.
The issue is that most of are running hardware that won't support it and games are still being made with PS4 and Xbox one. So for a while, it won't make economic sense to support it
The god of war port was the best day one port I've ever played
Not for me honestly
Kept running into out of memory crashes at launch
Seemed that it had a memory leak
Not sure if they fixed it
@@datingzoneo798 Spam detector not working right here Linus!
@Wonback if I remember correctly, it works by sweeping the comment section and deleting spam comments, but only when they run it. So they probably wait a while until the bulk if the views and comments have landed and then clean it up. In the mean time, keep reporting those spam comments when you see them!
@@Juanguar I played it for 40 hours in the first week of release and didnt get a single crash. But they patched quite a lot, so it's most likely fixed already
Sounds like good middle ground options here would be using the new direct storage tech, and making a new dx11.5 version to provide some newer benefits (like multi threading and asynchronous compute as mentioned in the video) without the complexity of dx12 where you program directly for all sorts of hardware configurations.
"like multi threading and asynchronous compute"
Those are two of the main reasons why Vulkan and DX12 were rewritten from the ground up instead of extending the older APIs. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it would require a *lot* of concessions GL and DX11 had fundamentally single threaded interfaces. All the extra thread and memory synchronization required by Vk and DX12 are a major part of what people to dislike those APIs, and that's what you'd gain. You wouldn't be left with much of the parts that people actually like about GL and DX11. Console side, devs have to deal with this too, but only dealing with a single kind of GPU when figuring out how to optimally schedule all the little bits of work and orchestrate the memory barriers and synchronization required is *MASSIVELY* simpler.
I love trying to listen to the conversation in the background at 2:27 onward
One potentially game changing improvement in the PC gaming space will be the introduction of unified memory across the CPU and PCIe devices. This is on AMD’s public roadmap for Infinity Fabric, and it’s primarily aimed at the HPC market with 8 GPU accelerators being able to pool memory with system RAM, but there is nothing preventing it from being utilized in consumer hardware. The biggest challenge will be managing where data should reside given the vastly difference capacity, bandwidths, and latency between system DRAM and VRAM. My understanding is that this shared pool of memory is supposed to be transparent for developers, but some magic is going to have to happen somewhere (firmware, compiler, operating system, drivers, etc) for this to work well. And unfortunately AMD’s work with consoles is not of much use in this regard as the consoles only have 1 pool of physical memory.
If amd doesn't do the magic then It won't happen
I don't think that the "game changer" is one specific technology, it's more the convergence of console and PC technology in general. This is made possible by the fact that we seemingly reached some kind of equilibrium in terms of graphics and performance where even mid-tear PC-hardware can run modern AAA games - and more importantly: actually make them look good or even stunning at playable FPS! When was the last 'Ultima IX-' or 'Crysis-moment' where even high-end systems struggled to run a 'next-gen graphics' game? In addition to the stagnation in graphics, technologies like DLSS/FSR make rendering in higher resolution less performance hungry and stuff like DirectStorage or Unified Memory (as you mentioned) can cover a lot of the shortcomings of consoles (and APUs) like the lack of dedcated VRAM or less memory in general.
In conlusion, console manufacturers can now use off-the-shelf PC-technologies for their consoles and the ensuing similarities of the platforms, both in terms of hardware as well as software, makes cross-developing or porting games over easier. The biggest issue however is legacy: while it's easy to say that a game only runs on PS5 but not on PS4, it's much harder to tell people that they can only play a game if they have a DX12 capable graphics card, a 12th gen/Zen5 CPU or a PCIe4.0 NVME SSD. People are used to different generations of consoles not beeing compatible with each other, but they won't accept upgrading their PC not because of performance but compatibility. Just look at the shitstorm Microsoft got when they required at least semi-modern hardware for Win11, then imagine Rockstar telling people they need at least a 30-series GPU to play GTA6 - the internet would explode...
Personally I've never tried to plug a HDMI cable into a PC game, but I did hear they don't tend to work too well
I don't get you. Plug a hdmi cable into a pc game??? What that mean??
@@TheVirtualArena24 hes being ironic, look at the title
@@prodHypeds What title?
@@killertruth186 the video title says "Why PC game ports still suck" and he was making a pun of the word "ports", like an hdmi port
@@prodHypeds what title? I don't get how his comment is ironic I don't even understand what he wrote. Can you explain
2:27 Riley in the background: "No way!!" :D
I would love this to be followed up with a video on what can be done about these issues.
crazy how a game is devolved on pc, ported to console, then brought back to pc and runs like shit at first till updates fix it. how truly strange.
Wouldn't be too strange at all, since as explained in Linus's video, developers only have to target one or two sets of fixed hardware. And in those fixed hardware, you have specialized equipment like a dedicated decompression chip that you can pass data to instead of the CPU or only deal with unified memory instead of juggling data between system ram and vram, which are things a PC would not have other than sheer brute force.
Even if you developed the game on a PC for a console, if you took that console game and brought it straight back to PC, it would run like shit.
For a split sec I thought Game Port is a physical port that I never heard of lmao
for real, for a moment I was like the f*** is Linus talking about? Guess I gotta click to see
You're not wrong... it was an old port for joysticks back in the day, it was a similar connector to VGA but was 15 pin and for joysticks
TBF waaaaaay back in the day we had a "game port" in PCs bceause joysticks/gamepads used a DB15 port. Sound cards usually had one of these, that could be used either for MIDI connection or joysticks/gamepads.
It is
Back in the 90s it was used for joysticks and controllers before usb was a thing
@@aruce9 I do remember some huge ports on the old motherboards. I only know one of those is for printer but I guess I'm not old enough to know all the other ports lmao
Wow I was wondering why 70 percent of my game library stutters now and then even with a rtx 3080 and ryzen.3900 x
Super erklärt!
now i understand why monster hunter world with iceborne had so long loading times on my all amd system. since i switched to dx12 it is blazing fast as like the sytems of my friends. no painfully long laoding times just by switching to dx12.
great insight on the amd part here nice work
"Consoles are more PC-like than ever before." Um... The first Xbox from 2001 WAS a PC. A 733MHz Pentium III, if memory serves. It ran a version of Windows 2000, and the name was derived from the fact that it used DirectX 8.1.
it ran its own proprietary OS based on the NT Kernel. While it shared many features with Windows, especially DirectX features, which made it easy for developers to migrate to, and especially caused its boom among modders and homebrews - it is still, to this day, fundamentally incompatible with Windows.
I could be wrong about this, but wouldn't vulkan be a better graphics API for these ports? I don't know how well it would run on consoles (I'm more of a pc person) but the API already works well between windows and linux for example.
Shader compiling on pc is shown directly when using cemu the wii u emulator, loading breath of the wild will basically cause the game to run at like 10fps for a large chunk of your first playthrough
a decent amount of this is caused by old design paradigms from the way things used to work and just lack of flexibility on the dev's part. it's fairly easy to port when built from the ground up to be ported, but of course nothing is ever easy on the triple A schedule crunch. it also doesn't require just one person to shift paradigms but multiple teams and entire already built and maintained workflows to change.
I remember Horizon Zero Dawn having the ability to compile shaders before you start playing, I don't see performance issues often though so I don't know if it helped or not. Either way I hope developers make the extra effort to make their games work as well as possible, I know for a fact that it can be done.
They recently reworked they shader compilation on the fly and dlss December 7.
Multithreading utilization is on point.
Based on the background noise in this video, i'm expecting some wild things from the next tech linked.
There seemed to be several instances of weird background noise in this video... Maybe low voices or distant shouts. Some examples between 2:50 and 3:00 ...
Is there a kid on set or someone really loud at the office?
You forgot to mention the most important problem with console titles ported over to PC. The menus and controls assume you've only got a controller and pretty much suck.
i remember back in the days of ps3, wii and xbox 360 there were written agreements where you wernt allowed to make your game run better on other platforms so pc versions were especially attrocious because the hardware of an 8 year old wii was vastly inferior to a gaming pc made the same year the game came out.
What? A Wii port was never better than a PC port.
Most X360/PS3 ports were also not superior to PC in 99% of the cases.
Pretty sure you missed with Alex's last name, but either way always good to see cross channel content
Yup, he messed it up.
Love Alex's deep dives & tech focus vids!
That background noise is very NICE!
Also: same reason why Windows games on Linux suck, or why ARM emulation on x64 sucks, because the OS isn't designed to work with the resources given
I really hope Steam Deck will start to get developers working with Vulkan over DirectX.
hopefully the steam deck will change things with linux.
If developers would eventually start care about linux, it might not suck at all.
Also with windows 11 doing even more crazy stuff, maybe more people will switch to linux now.
Windows games on Linux sometimes run better than Windows games on Windows (though not always)
Also why Macs just aren't for gaming but Mactards refuse to believe the truth
Game ports ... You need an upgrade Linus, most people use USB nowadays
I just want to know if shader compilation stutter is unavoidable. It appears to be getting worse these days and I absolutely cannot stand stutter.
I have a high end pc and I love pc gaming, but I do not care if I am getting better performance than a console if it stutters all the time while I play it.
Is there a solution at all to this problem? Or is it unfixable?
I know some shaders can be compiled on load, but I've heard that some cannot, and that concerns me.
I just want my games smooth
NUMA has certain advantages over UMA, although UMA does enable zero-copy b/w cpu and gpu, but because of shared bus and more complex to maintain coherent L2/L3 there is a CPU starvation and latency penalty which is a big problem for games with huge simulations like Skyrim or RDR2, since CPU is waiting for most of the time for GPU to stop using the bus..
For such a professional studio, it surprises me that you didn't do something about the yelling in the background, in the audio.
Someone tried to tell me that console ports to PC don't require a lot of programming to move over. This entire video says they are wrong
Take full advantage of this situation. Ask that person if they'd be willing to place a money bet on their claim. When they accept the bet and you shake hands, BOOM, hit them with this video. Then claim your prize.
@@DeadPixel1105 He wouldn't make a bet if his life actually depended on it. He was a troll who claimed that it wasn't "that big a deal" because it only took "one or two years" to port it over
Can someone explain to me why a lot of games (Dying Light 2 for example) support ultrawide in gameplay but not in cut scenes, but then literally the day it launches someone makes a mod fix with seemingly little effort . Why is ultrawide not fully supported out of the box when it seems to be relatively easy to do? I'm genuinely curious why this still gets overlooked in games in 2022.
I'm guessing they add the borders on purpose either for dramatic effect or so you can't see things you're not meant to
dude is that riley doing crazy shit in the background
god I thought I'm hallucinating
I wonder if this could be solved by having a sort of shared base standard of expectations for pc games going forward. Like, a stamp for a game that means it requires a cpu/gpu/OS that supports specific features, like DirectX12 for just an example. Nothing fake and marketie, but something that made it so that devs wouldn't have to worry about so many different devices to cater too. Kinda like establish a lowest common denominator, but really high haha.
So basically PC players are suffering from too powerful hardware?
no, from too much diversity in their hardware
is there a short circit in the background? It sounds like riley is loosing it in the background.
This is the best explanation for the layman on what's going on with PC stuttering in newer ports lately. Well done.
Just a few days ago I saw an old episode of scrapyard wars (2nd season maybe? I think it was 2014) and someone in the comments was shitting on the PS4, because that cheapo PC was apparantlly more powerful than it.
Some people just don't take optimization into consideration. That PC may had more raw power at that time but a PS4 will still run God of War better than that PC. Hell, it will still run GoW Ragnarok and Horizon 2.
It may run GoW Rag, and H2...but it won't be running it at anything a sane person would consider "playable". sub 720p and 20 fps average, anyone?
@@NM-qd3tm The PS4 won't run those games sub 720p tho. And my point wasn't that the PS4 has exclusives. Take Horizon 1. That's on PC. Run that on a PS4 and then on that 2014 scrapyard wars PC. The PS4 will give you a better experience, because of optimization.
@@NM-qd3tm Sub 720p 30fps on first party titles ? That's not a switch
@@NM-qd3tm pretty sure the ps4 only do1080p
Even without the hardware shortage, the whole price to performance argument has been objectively won by consoles, especially in the most recent generation. However, PC still has it's strengths that console can't match. Mods, odd resolutions, multiple screens (for discord or other parallel apps), emulation, server hosting, input flexibility, niche adaptability (hard to make a console for an audiophile)... the list probably goes on. Consoles have dabbled in a few of these areas but PC remains the king of these areas.
I think as we move forward and consoles get ever more PC-like, this is where PC will hold on. I currently game on a super-ultrawide with various inputs (many not accepted by consoles). Can't get that with a Series X. I think it's more likely though that with consoles getting more PC-like, we'll see the concept of the console kind of merge into a new meaning. It'll be more: here is a box. You can play our games anywhere but we guarantee compatibility with this box.
It amazes me to no end why game devs STILL refuse to prioritize the PC version. 1st and the console last as it should be.
The damn game is BUILT...LITERALLY using a f+&king PC...not a conslow...devs
That's your sign (as in cousin to the phrase " HERE'S YOUR SIGN ")..
It doesn't get more obvious than that game devs
Stop f++king over the PCMR with shitty ports
The console port tends to sell far more than the PC port.
That's why. They follow the money.
bruh, if you take PCMR seriously, ma man, you need to touch some grass...
@Transistor Jump bruh, who tf are you?
@Transistor Jump of course, I wake up mad, go to bed mad, touch some grass mad, communicate with lobotomites mad. There's no other way to talk to y'all 👍
At least you have a wide open platform and hardware you really own and can do anything you want with it.
Plus there are still tons of great games that run perfectly fine.
For me it´s the go for platform for basically anything.
Why are we bringing console wars into this?
RTZ IO /Direct Storage can't come fast enough. Load all textures from 7000+ mbs nvme to 24GB VRAM on GPU. Would alleviate all the switching back and Fourth?
"suck" is a big exaggeration. A few stutters now and then and a few FPS drops is much better than the massive FPS drops these games get on PS4 Pro, while running at 30 FPS tops (for most the games)
Constant 30 fps is better than 60 dropping to 30 with 1 second stutters here and there.
If modern consoles just pushed for keyboard/mouse support on their games I would game more on consoles. Less work would go into porting over to PC then as well - they could spend more time on actual performance rather than UI and input.
To be clear for me the entire PC vs. console war is all about keyboard/mouse vs. controller. Fine thumb adjustments are actually difficult for me.
Lack of mouse and keyboard support is the only reason I don't fuck with consoles. If mouse and keyboard support became standard for consoles, I'd get into console gaming immediately.
Games could give an option to use the motion sensor in controllers on PlayStation to aim. I think that it's as good as mouse aiming and it's more comfortable and no additional hardware is required. They could use the touchpad for swipes in different directions or an other type of touch menu for quick selection of items. And now we have a more efficient controller layout.
I think that Xbox controllers have outdated design and hold controller controls back. New PlayStation controllers are very capable and underutilised. (They are underutilised on PlayStation; on PC, they can be configured how the user wants it.)
I am always wondering... how much performance are we leaving on the table with bad ports, Windows overhead, poorly optimized games for my setup. My PC should be at least twice as powerful as a PS5/XSX, but it is not.
How can we make it so devs can use these tools to make automatic optimizations for drivers? How do we make it take only a day rather than 2
Invest in the companies and demand change
For those with the money and thus able to have the best of both worlds, just get a PC and a console. :)
@@TRONiX404 Would you think 50gb is easy to work on for PC Ports? Nope.
Dude, you are not an amateur channel, why can we still hear Riley SCREAMING like a mad man in the background?
That's *precisely* why it's not an amateur channel.
so people like you comment about it. lol
YT did you dirty with that blocky background compression
what about all the games that have pre compiled shaders as a toggle option?
PC ports are more than performance, Linus. I'm finding a lot of PC games are affected by consoles in design. In Dying Light 2, a new release, instead of using 1-4 for weapons, 5 for cycle consumables, and 6 for cycle healing items, you click 1 2 or 3 to cycle the three types. Holding the buttons brings up a radial wheel... Not very intuitive, or friendly for PC players.
What drove me bonkers is to change arrow type, the only way is to hold 3 (to bring up the weapon wheel) and with the bow highlighted and still holding 3, you cycle arrows with A and D. HOW IS THIS INTUITIVE? There's not even a hotkey to do this, like 7.
I really don't like radial wheels. They're great for console, but damn do PC games not need them...