Love how Alex spent the time to not only respond to criticism, but double down and clearly illustrate his point in more detail. Great work all around. Digital Foundry is truly doing gods work out here for us consumers.
I get the feeling he's speaking out of ignorance, primarily because I presume he doesn't really understand the nature of game simulation programming. A game simulation is not a video processing program whose algorithms are fundamentally parallelizable. Unlike a video processing program, game simulations, due to the inherently cyclic nature of actors and events, are inherently non-parallelizable at their core. Due to these cyclic dependencies, it's not just a matter of throwing additional manpower at games to parallelize them; there are fundamental limitations. One potential exception is implementing game simulations with a multithreaded ECS, but that approach has its own set of significant trade-offs and limitations of applicability. Unless he thinks he can force the entire industry to move into that rather experimental mode of simulation development based on his likely inadequately informed view (at least in this matter), it's not a realistic thing to overly-focus on, and certainly not something to start arguing with actual game engineers about. The game engineer parallelizes what he can when he can and lets the primary cores carry the bulk of the load. Yes, they can always do a better job, but due to the mathematical properties of the interactive simulation programming, the returns on the effort will always be quickly diminishing.
ACG is another good review source, if you have a game the aren't covering. His is more about the actual game, but does have some hardware comments. They compliment each other well.
I wonder if the shadows disappearing is a feature of the flash light, but somehow managed to never turn off. It's kind of similar to how John was getting stuck in the running animation at walking speed, but that's a very unqualified observation. I wonder if Arkane could quickly redeem themselves with a spinoff like Death of the outsider or Prey Mooncrash. Maybe they'd be better off ditching the IP though.
@@fintangeraghty96 its starting to seem like they fired everyone competent and just hired some incompetent newbies. Like compare this game to Prey the previous game made by this company, and the difference in quality is huge.
it is bizarre. first time i saw something like this was Cyberpunk where rows of bollards in the pavement faded out of existence as i moved toward them, but when i backed away from them, they faded back into existence.
Meanwhile some EA talking head is trying to bullshit us by saying that poor performance is a problem of “certain CPU/GPU combinations”. Thanks DF for setting things straight, you’re our only hope!
Hardware Unboxed is another good one for that, Steve benchmarked Star Wars on Windows 10 and 11 and surprise surprise, performance is identical. Maybe even a couple FPS better in Windows 10.
@@mjc0961 Hardware Unboxed should have benchmarked SW:JS on 12th or 13th gen Intel CPUs (with E-Cores and P-Cores) instead of AMD. That would have been much more interesting.
I can’t believe this is from the same studio that made Prey 2017 and that they had a whole extra year of delay after the originally slated release date to get it right.
@@filip9587 That made me shudder. They can't possibly have spent a year to improve the assets or story in Redfall - They are crap now, they would have had to have been explosive diarrhea a year ago, if they were improved the last year.
Just becaused microsoft bought Bethesda it does not mean they own the developers. Its probably many new inexperienced developer and many experienced that leaved Arkane Studios. They go from A team to F team. So its not so hard to belive. Yeah some of the higher ups is still ther but they alone with inexperienced developers wont help. Then there is also tha fact that Dana nightingale told in a intervju that they will probably never do a linear single player game agian. They quit what they are good at and starts to experiment with open world games with level design that is great but the rest like story and gameplay cant keep up and it is a mess. Sad times.
One thing missing here. Framerates drop below 45-50 even inside small bland rooms regardless of settings on a high-end card at 1080p. It is a baffling game.
@@Starlit43 3070 brethren. It didn't freeze for me with latest drivers but there r a lot of framedrops. And I've finished the game... You are not missing out on anything good.
Don’t give up, Alex. Don’t burn out. It may feel like you’re screaming at a wall, but find comfort in the fact that you’re providing a valuable service for us. Thanks to you I’m not spending money on broken games. Tot weerziens maatje.
I've been out of the gaming scene for a few years, but based on DF's latest reviews - I feel the old adage of waiting a year or however long it takes for these 'games' to hit $9.99-$19.99 is still valid.
There's only 1-2 games a year or less that I need to play on launch, a game like Elden Ring for example. Stuff like this? you can wait till it's 90% off, they're never worth full price.
It’s funny yet frustrating that people refuse to accept evidence on performance test. You provide actual evidence yet some can’t accept it as fact… what a silly world we live in.
Yup they are the same incels that just demand you upgrade your pc, when all that does is enable more shitty pc ports and doesn’t actually fix the root issues. Those kinds of people are just as much to blame for the state of pc gaming as the talentless devs that shit out these ports.
Unfortunately, there is an actual contingent of people who think, "This is good enough! We don't deserve better!" and get angry with you if you don't agree with them.
I took them way too long and it doesn't excuse the terrible launch, but they did turn things around for the most part (it's still a 'good' game instead of 'amazing' at its best state tho)
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It was horrible at launch but now it's far superior than these new garbage. They fixed the performance a lot while the game looks pretty damn good. At least in case of CP 2077, I understand the high system requirements at high settings. The game looks good. But also it can be played on lower spec hardware because the engine has a great scalability.
Yeah, CP has recovered remarkably well on a technical level. Shame the gameplay improvements were mostly left behind. That being the case, Redfall (and Jedi Survivor) may still be salvageable if their development teams can work out the technical issues over the coming few weeks/months. It's been done before on various suboptimal pc ports.
I love the showcase of limited cpu core utilization when compared to Cyberpunk. Over the years, I feel like I’ve learned a lot just by being a regular viewer. Eventually we will get a good pc port hopefully.
man i wonder what itll be. i hope we can get a port of ragnarok on par or better than gow 2018 and days gone. and i hope it comes soon like within a year. cmon sony take the money its not hurting you give us more horizon too you sl*t comoncmon
Incredibly well put together video, Alex! I really appreciate the deep dive on CPU utilization. It must've taken a lot of time to re-test Star Wars & Cyberpunk to validate the point.
I am honestly baffled that there are people defending the idea that more cores means less performance. I get the idea of diminishing returns when it comes to hardware, but not regressing returns. That is just not how things are supposed to work.
We are using Cyberpunk as standard candle now how game should be optimized and work and I am not even going to mention it work better with path tracing than some games normally should, its that bad
Thanks to all the Digital Foundry team for spread awareness to the gaming community about the bad state developers are delivering nowadays, if we are more conscious consumers this may improve things at least a bit.
Man, it genuinely bums me out to audibly notice how dejected Alex (rightfully!) is with the current wave of PC ports. Sending a virtual hug your way, sir. And keep fighting the good fight!
It's the worst year for gamers that don't have self control and have to absolutely play every release day one because FOMO... If you are patient enough, the best experience is always on PC.
Worst year since when? 2010 or something? Most games in the PS1 and even PS2 era didn't even got ports and when they released something, the PC version was usually buggy and significent worse. The current situation is far from great, but atleast the games are mostly playable.
it’s kind of incredible how awful shadows look in this game, and how epic settings do literally nothing to alleviate it. shadows in UE4 don’t even look that bad by default, they practically had to get it that way themselves
They probably did it to save cpu performance but clearly there’s more fundamental issues. The 30fps Xbox cap is a major red flag for cpu performance being horrible
UE4 has grown up to make me cringe anytime I see a big studio using it on a new release. It seems that chance it turns into a highlights reel of every common UE4 problem increases every year.
@1:55 Even this otherwise "good" menu has serious usability issues. Notice how the upscaling technique menu item jumps up and down on screen depending on the number of related options for the chosen technique. It's as if the designer never used a mouse before, and then the tester didn't try the resulting interface with a mouse. (EDIT: They could allow the menu to scroll past the end of the last option. Then, if the chosen upscaling technique has fewer associated options, empty space would be shown at the bottom rather than yanking earlier menu items down to fill the space.)
Oh god YES, I am a UX/web designer and it drove me nuts seeing that. I'm sure that note is sitting in some QA spreadsheet at Arcane under the "low-priority" bucket...
@@LaSagadeF big Rich might have to step in if you know what i mean... He was at an airport the last time i heard from him. Might be he's flying over to arcane or respawn to set things rightm
or FH5 or many other games from both Sony and MS (and others too) that are fine - yes both of them have cock ups, some of them huge, so while people are correct to point out the shyt that leaks out, they need to be mindful of studios and games which dont do that. The defeatist "well every game has issues" is actually, paradoxically, not how you combat any of these - you shove the good games into the face of the naysayers and the developers - many game launching bad is not an excuse, there is not cover. If Sony and MS can go good/great PC ports, then their failures should be compared to that, not couched among many other failures as cover.
@@xBINARYGODx Yup. Sony did a good job with Returnal, but they also royally screwed the pooch with The Last of Us Part 1. Both Sony and Microsoft CAN do better, we as their potential customer should DEMAND they do better and not buy these games if they don't. "At least Redfall launches, so it's better than TLOU" is the wrong answer. Redfall is still a crap PC version and Microsoft should have done better.
@@mjc0961 technically Sony ex first party games are not designed for pc port in mind orignaly hence why they may or may not look that smooth run on pc due to engine etc
I meant for an UE4 game, the amount of optimization and care gone into the Returnal PC port is commendable. They dropped the ball hard on TLOU PC port though.
I'm glad that Cyberpunk is being highlighted for its good use of cores - some people continue to bizarrely claim that it's a CPU limited game, or unoptimized, when it's the exact opposite.
Alex is really stepping into the shoes of Totalbiscuit, relentlessly holding studios and publishers accountable for their inexusable PC ports. Bless him! I really hoped this was a thing of the past during the ps3/xb360 era, but as it seems, we are going back to neglecting PC, despite being the biggest platform atm...
The tests with cpu cores was great. With a lot of new big games struggling with multi threading, it would be interesting to know how difficult it is for developers. But was good learning a little bit about it
Fantastic stuff as always from Alex, I can hear the frustration with this on-going PC trend in your voice :( Or at least I hope that's all it is and nothing too serious!
@@GyroO7 It stutters for me from time to time (and at the first AI encounter) like in most games, depends on how much my HDD likes me in the session. At least it doesn´t stutter constantly like AC Origins
Thanks for keeping on with reporting shoddy ports Alex. One of the few journalists who I can count on for an in-depth PC perf breakdown before buying. Fortunately, I had this one through GamePass PC. I'm curious though if that affected their decision to release it in such a state. Maybe they were ok with releasing it because they thought half of the players would play it for "free" which would be an upsetting precedent if so. As a side note, it'd be really awesome if you could put a score card at the end of your PC port videos. Something like a table with the common pitfalls for PC ports and then a letter grade. For example on this vid it could look like: Title | Grade ----------------------------------|----------- Shader comp stutter | A Traversal stutter | D Graphics scaling | D CPU utilization | D Graphics menus nav | C etc... Or could align with the vid you released on the most important features of a good PC port. Just a thought, either way keep up the good work
@@scarlet_dani I dont like the game myself, its a 5/10 for me, a bigger bloated far cry lying to be a deus ex style game, with none of the social commentary and none of the immersive sim elements in level design. The game isnt all terrible, but it should have launched in 2023 (like most of the devs expected) not 2020
Getting real tired of finding out that every game I'm actually interested in is either broken, unfished, or a combination of both. Imagine if movies were released as unfished as modern $70 AAA games are?
GPUs being unobtainable, PC ports being trash.... I think now is the time to finally go through my Steam backlog and give the games that actually deserve it a shot.
March 28th: Surely nothing will be worse than TLOU Part 1 April 27th: Surely nothing will be worse than Jedi: Survivor May 1st: Surely nothing will be worse than Redfall
To be fair, PC version of Cyberpunk has always been great, I played it at launch and had no significant issues. The engine is coded very well on PC - not just in how it uses CPU, but also how it seamlessly supports DSR and all the other features.
We have come at a point where Cyberpunk is more favourable in terms of optimization in comparison to the latest games. Remember two years ago what state it was in.
Eh UE4 for dates back to 2015 when the consumer PC market was dominated by either 4 core 4 threaded CPU's or at best 4 core 8 threaded CPU's. So they made the engine optimized around this number of processors and threads. No one expected Ryzen to come in around 2017-18 and blow open the doors to high core counts with high clock speeds. So we are stuck with an 8 year old engine designed for Haswell era CPU's trying to make ambitious giant open world games that it can barely handle. Throwing cores at the problem does nothing, either they change the underlying engine code, which is very unlikely, or optimize every line of code to get better performance out of those single threaded scenarios, which is what I think they are scrambling to do atm.
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Yeah, I have a feeling it's engine related too. So developers should have considered it while making the game... or games. Because this is not the only UE4 game suffering the same issue. Jedi: Survivor is having the issue as it was shown in the video too. So they should have make compromises in some territories and calculate these issues in. If the engine is not capable of certain things then don't do it. Or develop on a different engine. Though UE4 is pretty easy to use and probably it's one way to rush a game out. Still needs a lot of time to develop something good but Arkane didn't even try here.
I had no idea there was even textures in some parts. I was just standing there checking something and when i came back to the game, a nice message had appeared on the wall in front of me!
Ingoring the bugs,lack of optimization and being overpriced. this game is like millennial humor and constant parasitic quirky jokes every 10 mins. Not to mentiont he dudes that are skinny effeminte twinks, and the black women who entire personality is "student debt"..... The only game that has ever did any of that semi competently is borderlands and even that game (3 mostly) grates on the nerves and sadly borderlands popularized the millennial jokes/ personality.
It would be nice to see a technical deep dive into Unreal engine 4. I'm quite curious why this specific game engine causes so much trouble for game developers these days. It's also strange that these problems occur so late in the engine's life cycle. I remember that one of the first UE4 games was Gears 4 from 2016 which was super optimized. Gears 4 (and 5) still LOOKS and RUNS much better than Redfall. I don't know how we went from 4-8 GB of VRAM usage to 16 and 24 when games don't even look better or look downright worse. Gears of War 4 and Jedi Surviver are graphically comparable. Do a side by side, they are not that different. The difference: you only need like a 1070 to max out Gears on 1440p (maybe even 4k). Try that with Jedi Surviver without the latest patch and you get a 15 fps slideshow. It's like they're deliberately screwing around with PC gamers. Resident Evil 4 does not look any different from the RE2 and RE3 remakes and I played those games maxed out on my old 1070 with significant headroom to spare. Now I'm forced to use the 1GB low res textures with my 3070Ti because the game eats up a gazillion gigabytes of VRAM for no reason while looking EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE LAST 2 GAMES?! WTF?! 🤨
@@znubionek Yes, but these issues were not really present on older titles (namely Gears 4 and 5 or even Fortnite) and the same goes for the RE engine. My guess it's not really the engine's fault. I mean Devil May Cry V runs on the RE engine too and the frame rate is sky high. Granted it has less advanced features implemented, but you really don't notice it during gameplay.
This year's PC games are reminding me of Pokémon games on Switch. They released Sword/Shield and I thought "This is the bottom of the barrel" Then they released Legends Arceus and I thought "OK, THIS is the bottom of the barrel" Then Scarlet/Violet was released and I don't even know anymore. PC is going the same route with TLOU > Jedi Survivor > Redfall
The fading out shadows and close look is an Engine Bug I reported to Epic over a year ago. The report got deleted a month after reporting it with no efforts taken ... Epic no longer cares about the games idustrie and bloats Unreal Engine with stuff for the movie industrie while breaking the engine more and more over the years.
@@thepadster123 i never seen a gamin engine that is giving people so much trouble then Unreal Engine 4. every unreal engine 4 title suffers the same issues
Was thinking about picking this game up for PC as I love Arkane. I will definitly avoid it now. Thank you very much for making this kind of videoes and inform us about the poorly optimized games. This trend of releasing unfinished games need to stop!
Devs could make 60 fps games like Call of Duty on the weak PS4 CPU, but not on much more powerful Ryzen CPUs? That makes no sense to me. Is there something wrong with Unreal Engine 4?
Well done Alex. A very honest Tech review. Could you just do the same video (just change the title) for all pc developers going forward, It would save us all an age !!
Current top 7 hitters worst PC ports 1. Jedi Survivor 2. The Last of Us Part 1 3. Dead Space Remastered 4. The Callisto Protocol 5. Resident Evil 4 remake 6. Atomic Heart 7. Redfall Yea that was 7 lol.. more incoming for PC gaming in 2023
Specifically looks like other than CDPR, they do not know how to use the E cores properly. Heavily using one or two main threads with most of the rest of the processor remaining underutilized seems like a problem, too. Appreciate the focus on this
Probably incompetence from the management. No way people on the inside didn't know their game wasn't ready. Phil Spencer said he wasn't aware of the poor state the game was in. Somebody hid stuff.
@@cedricpomerleau5586 listen dude... this game has many problems and you could say that performance issues were due to not enough time in the oven (I don't believe it as I explained in my 2nd post). But what about the rest? Did writers have not enough time to write good story and good quests? Did graphic designers have not enough time to make good character models? Did other devs have not enough time to set shadow casting correctly so that they don't vanish when you get closer? Like you people are so used to throwing rocks at management (they often deserce it) but you stay blind to clear fuck-ups of the lower tier employees. Yeah, due to the nature of things in the end managment is responsible for the product because they allowed it to be in certain condition but you people can't always ignore the employees that did shit-quality job. This game suffers from insane amount of incompetency on the team side.
Get um Digital Foundry! I’m glad that you all point this kind of thing out and make people aware of what’s going on with solid evidence. This type of behavior from the company’s that develop these games is awful. We as the consumer are expected to go out in droves and purchase faulty products that are substandard at best when it comes to bugs and performance. This isn’t only for game like red fall and Jedi survivor but many more of the course of 2022 and 2023. I know the people working to make these games for us work hard and it’s difficult to find out exactly who is at fault but in my field of work I am expected to deliver excellent service and I expect the same when being on the other end.
Yeah, but back then, video games were very much less complex than modern video games. The complexities of developing modern videogames is insane, and it would take sooo much time to release them in a completely finished, bug-less state.
@@jonRock That statement has been so bullshit… While the complexity of games has increased drastically, the software has been OVERLY simplified because of the evolution of technology. It’s gotten to the point where even some poor hobbyists is able to make a game with open source engines, and UE4. So you’re extremely flawed and wrong.
@@cowboylou optimization in what? PC? That’s not “complexity of making games” other than having to develop for a platform that’s not constant for its hardware. PS5 games are coming quite polished for example.
I love the fact that Cyberpunk is mentioned as a good CPU Utilization Example, when there are, still up to this day, issues Utilizing the full power on some AMD Ryzen CPUs...
Waiting for the end of the year's "WORST PC PORT AWARD" to happen. Tough competition in 2023
Fierce Competition
Redfall at least launches. Can't say the same with Last of Us Part 1 over a month later.
I want a „BEST TURNAROUND“ award to see what is actually playable a year later
Ahem. I'm waiting for Starfield. It's like gazing into the abyss.
@@kosmosyche hahhaha same here
Love how Alex spent the time to not only respond to criticism, but double down and clearly illustrate his point in more detail. Great work all around. Digital Foundry is truly doing gods work out here for us consumers.
Yeah, the part about core counts and corresponding performance was great!
@@InfiniteDarkMass yes. Seems like REDFALL is Ride to Hell Retribution 2.5.
He is channeling the hateful wrath of the late total biscuit
I get the feeling he's speaking out of ignorance, primarily because I presume he doesn't really understand the nature of game simulation programming. A game simulation is not a video processing program whose algorithms are fundamentally parallelizable. Unlike a video processing program, game simulations, due to the inherently cyclic nature of actors and events, are inherently non-parallelizable at their core. Due to these cyclic dependencies, it's not just a matter of throwing additional manpower at games to parallelize them; there are fundamental limitations.
One potential exception is implementing game simulations with a multithreaded ECS, but that approach has its own set of significant trade-offs and limitations of applicability. Unless he thinks he can force the entire industry to move into that rather experimental mode of simulation development based on his likely inadequately informed view (at least in this matter), it's not a realistic thing to overly-focus on, and certainly not something to start arguing with actual game engineers about.
The game engineer parallelizes what he can when he can and lets the primary cores carry the bulk of the load. Yes, they can always do a better job, but due to the mathematical properties of the interactive simulation programming, the returns on the effort will always be quickly diminishing.
As an game engineer, maybe I ought to just spin wait on any unutilized cores to make Alex happy. Look, full core utilization!
Digital Foundry is a great source for letting me know what not to buy. Truly saving me money and helping me not support half-assed game development.
You'll save a lot of money then as all ports are bad 😅
@@Adoooly1991 it really has been feeling like that recently. At least capcom mostly gets it right with RE, but even then there can be issues
ACG is another good review source, if you have a game the aren't covering. His is more about the actual game, but does have some hardware comments. They compliment each other well.
Its is not DF that is saving you money. Publishers save you money because they clearly don't want their games to be purchased
@@Adoooly1991 do you have poor short term memory or did you not play God Of War?
Reverse pop-in is a new one to me. The shadows vanishing the closer you are 🤦♂
I wonder if the shadows disappearing is a feature of the flash light, but somehow managed to never turn off. It's kind of similar to how John was getting stuck in the running animation at walking speed, but that's a very unqualified observation. I wonder if Arkane could quickly redeem themselves with a spinoff like Death of the outsider or Prey Mooncrash. Maybe they'd be better off ditching the IP though.
😂
@@fintangeraghty96 its starting to seem like they fired everyone competent and just hired some incompetent newbies. Like compare this game to Prey the previous game made by this company, and the difference in quality is huge.
😂
it is bizarre. first time i saw something like this was Cyberpunk where rows of bollards in the pavement faded out of existence as i moved toward them, but when i backed away from them, they faded back into existence.
The eventual starfield port review is gonna be a day
:(
Still no where near as bad as that Last of Us 1 port.
@@RubyRose23328 you played starfield yet ?
@@stephonhines6554Bethesda has yet to release a game that doesn't even launch half the time. Bugs yeah, but Even Fallout 76 launched.
Good old bugthesda
Meanwhile some EA talking head is trying to bullshit us by saying that poor performance is a problem of “certain CPU/GPU combinations”. Thanks DF for setting things straight, you’re our only hope!
Hardware Unboxed is another good one for that, Steve benchmarked Star Wars on Windows 10 and 11 and surprise surprise, performance is identical. Maybe even a couple FPS better in Windows 10.
@@mjc0961 Hardware Unboxed should have benchmarked SW:JS on 12th or 13th gen Intel CPUs (with E-Cores and P-Cores) instead of AMD. That would have been much more interesting.
The poor performance is from a bad combination of EA bosses.
I can’t believe this is from the same studio that made Prey 2017 and that they had a whole extra year of delay after the originally slated release date to get it right.
That 1 year doesn't mean it was spent on QA or the engine, it could have just been spent on the story and/or the assets and lighting.
@@filip9587 That made me shudder. They can't possibly have spent a year to improve the assets or story in Redfall - They are crap now, they would have had to have been explosive diarrhea a year ago, if they were improved the last year.
also the canceled PS5 version should've gave them literally more time to optimize.
I think Microsoft messed them up somehow.
Just becaused microsoft bought Bethesda it does not mean they own the developers. Its probably many new inexperienced developer and many experienced that leaved Arkane Studios.
They go from A team to F team. So its not so hard to belive.
Yeah some of the higher ups is still ther but they alone with inexperienced developers wont help.
Then there is also tha fact that Dana nightingale told in a intervju that they will probably never do a linear single player game agian. They quit what they are good at and starts to experiment with open world games with level design that is great but the rest like story and gameplay cant keep up and it is a mess. Sad times.
Man, having a game run crappy on a 4090 is truly an accomplishment!
I love buying a GPU that costs as much as a used car only for it to run games that look like they're running on a dying PS3.
They thought they were making a game for the future 😂
@@ohnoitschris PS3 games even better than PS5 in 66 percent of it.
Not any longer lol, it's becoming the norm
@@purwantiallan5089 only if you're blind af and high on nostalgia copium. Stop this cap and remember the dogshit sub 720p graphics from that era.
One thing missing here. Framerates drop below 45-50 even inside small bland rooms regardless of settings on a high-end card at 1080p. It is a baffling game.
It’s not even playable for me. Every few seconds the game straight up freezes for a few seconds. Rtx 3070 with a ryzen 7 3700
@@Starlit43 3070 brethren. It didn't freeze for me with latest drivers but there r a lot of framedrops. And I've finished the game... You are not missing out on anything good.
Well this explains why there also isn't a 60 fps mode on consoles. The game just doesn't use your CPU.
It's Gotham Knights all over again
All these new games dont 🙄😤
UE4 doing its magic
It sounds like it's not even using the device at all. The game is probably being brute streamed from the Internet. 😂
@@firstdondiego it feels like it😂
Don’t give up, Alex. Don’t burn out. It may feel like you’re screaming at a wall, but find comfort in the fact that you’re providing a valuable service for us. Thanks to you I’m not spending money on broken games. Tot weerziens maatje.
I've been out of the gaming scene for a few years, but based on DF's latest reviews - I feel the old adage of waiting a year or however long it takes for these 'games' to hit $9.99-$19.99 is still valid.
Good idea for triple A games. Indie and single A (triple B?) games are more than picking up the slack though
There's only 1-2 games a year or less that I need to play on launch, a game like Elden Ring for example. Stuff like this? you can wait till it's 90% off, they're never worth full price.
you'd pay 20 bucks for this? lol
Yep, people buying this game suffer of fomo and a bad game in the process
That’s a good way to go. You get the most content, the most stable and cheapest version of the game.
i feel like alex is on road to villain origin story with this pc ports
His Joker arc is about to begin.
"Fine. I'll do it myself."
traversal stutters and multithreading issues are the same on consoles. its just default unreal engine 4 behavior lol
Take 100th like. This is going to blow up soon, underrated.
It’s funny yet frustrating that people refuse to accept evidence on performance test. You provide actual evidence yet some can’t accept it as fact… what a silly world we live in.
Yup they are the same incels that just demand you upgrade your pc, when all that does is enable more shitty pc ports and doesn’t actually fix the root issues. Those kinds of people are just as much to blame for the state of pc gaming as the talentless devs that shit out these ports.
Just update your drivers.
@@AJ-xv7oh you're a monster!
Unfortunately, there is an actual contingent of people who think, "This is good enough! We don't deserve better!" and get angry with you if you don't agree with them.
@@Rationalific Or the people who say "I don't have any problems therefore problems don't exist".
Kinda stunning how Cyberpunk 2077 is used as an example of “things done right” 😂
tbf for how beautiful Cyberpunk is, it runs pretty well on all kinds of PC´s.. its well optimized
I took them way too long and it doesn't excuse the terrible launch, but they did turn things around for the most part (it's still a 'good' game instead of 'amazing' at its best state tho)
It was horrible at launch but now it's far superior than these new garbage. They fixed the performance a lot while the game looks pretty damn good. At least in case of CP 2077, I understand the high system requirements at high settings. The game looks good. But also it can be played on lower spec hardware because the engine has a great scalability.
Yeah, CP has recovered remarkably well on a technical level. Shame the gameplay improvements were mostly left behind. That being the case, Redfall (and Jedi Survivor) may still be salvageable if their development teams can work out the technical issues over the coming few weeks/months. It's been done before on various suboptimal pc ports.
@ Even at launch it was pretty well optimised on pc, buggy, but optimised
I love the showcase of limited cpu core utilization when compared to Cyberpunk. Over the years, I feel like I’ve learned a lot just by being a regular viewer. Eventually we will get a good pc port hopefully.
man i wonder what itll be. i hope we can get a port of ragnarok on par or better than gow 2018 and days gone. and i hope it comes soon like within a year. cmon sony take the money its not hurting you give us more horizon too you sl*t comoncmon
@@completelytransparent6320 agree bro.
Same. I've learnt quite a bit from these guys 🧡
The shadows disappearing when you look at them is just another example of the double slit experiment.
@@MysticCoder The shadows are quantum-tunneling to the fences to create the interference pattern. It's quite simple really.
"It's not a bug it's a quantum physics phenomena" is deffo my new fave.
It's a FEATURE
@@andytunnah7650 Stealing this for when Starfield releases
Incredibly well put together video, Alex! I really appreciate the deep dive on CPU utilization. It must've taken a lot of time to re-test Star Wars & Cyberpunk to validate the point.
I am honestly baffled that there are people defending the idea that more cores means less performance. I get the idea of diminishing returns when it comes to hardware, but not regressing returns. That is just not how things are supposed to work.
We are using Cyberpunk as standard candle now how game should be optimized and work and I am not even going to mention it work better with path tracing than some games normally should, its that bad
2023, the year that keeps on giving
The year of shitty AAA PC ports.
Oh, Starfield will be interesting 😏
Pc gaming was shit from start
curious to see if the issues will be fixed within a week like jedi fallen order as they are both unreal engine 4 games.
@@liev5214 Consoles aren't that great either sir.
Thanks to all the Digital Foundry team for spread awareness to the gaming community about the bad state developers are delivering nowadays, if we are more conscious consumers this may improve things at least a bit.
THEY CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT!
The vanishing shadows are very on-brand for the vampire theme
Man, it genuinely bums me out to audibly notice how dejected Alex (rightfully!) is with the current wave of PC ports.
Sending a virtual hug your way, sir. And keep fighting the good fight!
RIP Alex not even half way through what is already the worst year for PC gaming
This is a bit dramatic. I feel like PC has had way worse years than a couple bad ports.
It's the worst year for gamers that don't have self control and have to absolutely play every release day one because FOMO...
If you are patient enough, the best experience is always on PC.
@@Ayoul Don't forget the exuberant prices for new GPUs too. The RTX 40 Series is just as atrocious as these games.
Worst year since when? 2010 or something? Most games in the PS1 and even PS2 era didn't even got ports and when they released something, the PC version was usually buggy and significent worse. The current situation is far from great, but atleast the games are mostly playable.
That's what people already said about 2022.
it’s kind of incredible how awful shadows look in this game, and how epic settings do literally nothing to alleviate it. shadows in UE4 don’t even look that bad by default, they practically had to get it that way themselves
They probably did it to save cpu performance but clearly there’s more fundamental issues. The 30fps Xbox cap is a major red flag for cpu performance being horrible
Those shadow look worse than GTA San Andreas on high settings 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Honestly the performance is the least of this game's problems.
how tf do you even mess up a Left 4 Dead knockoff 15 years after that game's release. like how on earth
how many hours you played? im finding that the story gets as interesting as other games a little while in.
UE4 has grown up to make me cringe anytime I see a big studio using it on a new release. It seems that chance it turns into a highlights reel of every common UE4 problem increases every year.
@1:55 Even this otherwise "good" menu has serious usability issues. Notice how the upscaling technique menu item jumps up and down on screen depending on the number of related options for the chosen technique. It's as if the designer never used a mouse before, and then the tester didn't try the resulting interface with a mouse.
(EDIT: They could allow the menu to scroll past the end of the last option. Then, if the chosen upscaling technique has fewer associated options, empty space would be shown at the bottom rather than yanking earlier menu items down to fill the space.)
Oh god YES, I am a UX/web designer and it drove me nuts seeing that. I'm sure that note is sitting in some QA spreadsheet at Arcane under the "low-priority" bucket...
So true. And so annoying at the same time.
Alex truly is Richard Leadbetter born again! Amazing content. It really feels like Alex is the inner beast Rich is always trying so hard to suppress
I really like watching Alex' coverage. I worry about his mental health being impacted with the years of low quality pc releases :(
@JacenAT Yeah. What was the last time he actually got to make a positive video? It's been a while hasn't it?
@@hansolo6831 Yeah ... not liking that one bit :/
@@JacenLP He had a kind of breakdown about 3 months ago on a DF Direct. I think he had recovered, but 2023 is still young....
@@LaSagadeF big Rich might have to step in if you know what i mean... He was at an airport the last time i heard from him. Might be he's flying over to arcane or respawn to set things rightm
This makes you appreciate how good the Returnal PC port was.
or FH5 or many other games from both Sony and MS (and others too) that are fine - yes both of them have cock ups, some of them huge, so while people are correct to point out the shyt that leaks out, they need to be mindful of studios and games which dont do that. The defeatist "well every game has issues" is actually, paradoxically, not how you combat any of these - you shove the good games into the face of the naysayers and the developers - many game launching bad is not an excuse, there is not cover.
If Sony and MS can go good/great PC ports, then their failures should be compared to that, not couched among many other failures as cover.
And Sony doesn't even own the Windows operating system lol
@@xBINARYGODx Yup. Sony did a good job with Returnal, but they also royally screwed the pooch with The Last of Us Part 1.
Both Sony and Microsoft CAN do better, we as their potential customer should DEMAND they do better and not buy these games if they don't.
"At least Redfall launches, so it's better than TLOU" is the wrong answer. Redfall is still a crap PC version and Microsoft should have done better.
@@mjc0961 technically Sony ex first party games are not designed for pc port in mind orignaly hence why they may or may not look that smooth run on pc due to engine etc
I meant for an UE4 game, the amount of optimization and care gone into the Returnal PC port is commendable. They dropped the ball hard on TLOU PC port though.
Yes, here we are. We are at a point where CP2077 is presented as an example of a good PC optimization in comparison
I'm glad that Cyberpunk is being highlighted for its good use of cores - some people continue to bizarrely claim that it's a CPU limited game, or unoptimized, when it's the exact opposite.
Alex is really stepping into the shoes of Totalbiscuit, relentlessly holding studios and publishers accountable for their inexusable PC ports.
Bless him!
I really hoped this was a thing of the past during the ps3/xb360 era, but as it seems, we are going back to neglecting PC, despite being the biggest platform atm...
"Star Wars Jedi Survivor PC Review: The Worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023"
Redfall: "Hold my student debt"
Starfield: may I join the fun?
Hey Alex, du machst einfach ein tolles Job mit deiner Analyse und Erklärungen! Weiter so!
The weird cpu utilization problems really makes you wonder what the hell they added on top of the basic UE4 engine to achieve those oddities...
The tests with cpu cores was great. With a lot of new big games struggling with multi threading, it would be interesting to know how difficult it is for developers. But was good learning a little bit about it
Fantastic stuff as always from Alex, I can hear the frustration with this on-going PC trend in your voice :(
Or at least I hope that's all it is and nothing too serious!
Poor Alex is really getting put through the wringer this year
Imagine paying $4k+ for a 4090 build just to have your games stutter…
no, you pay for a 4k+ 4090 so you can play solitaire or minesweeper, not the AAA games (jk)
4k$? ;-)
@@pencilcheck You spend $4k and a 4090 to play League lol
@@venichen1 league is too powerful for a 4090, you would need a 5090 :P
Big phil is not aware of the state of the game before it launch.
They even have it reviewed internally and it scored better.
Amazing!!
The fact that now Cyberpunk is used as a comparison for a good port is wild, a lot has really changed since that launch
It always had good optimization
I played it on my gtx 1050ti from day one without any stutters
It just had a lot of graphical glitches
@@GyroO7 It stutters for me from time to time (and at the first AI encounter) like in most games, depends on how much my HDD likes me in the session. At least it doesn´t stutter constantly like AC Origins
Memba in the long time ago when games just worked...I do...
As always, great video, Alex!! I really appreciate you covering cpu utilization. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for keeping on with reporting shoddy ports Alex. One of the few journalists who I can count on for an in-depth PC perf breakdown before buying. Fortunately, I had this one through GamePass PC. I'm curious though if that affected their decision to release it in such a state. Maybe they were ok with releasing it because they thought half of the players would play it for "free" which would be an upsetting precedent if so.
As a side note, it'd be really awesome if you could put a score card at the end of your PC port videos. Something like a table with the common pitfalls for PC ports and then a letter grade. For example on this vid it could look like:
Title | Grade
----------------------------------|-----------
Shader comp stutter | A
Traversal stutter | D
Graphics scaling | D
CPU utilization | D
Graphics menus nav | C
etc...
Or could align with the vid you released on the most important features of a good PC port.
Just a thought, either way keep up the good work
This game actually uses quantum shadow rendering. When observed they become chaotic and random.
Genius level pun
Great job Alex, always super informative. Appreciate your hard work!
Snacks on your finger.
Great explanation on CPU usage in games, I was wondering if there was a setup that can help with these PPP, but it seems there is no way around it.
I think the quote at 12:38 really sums it up nicely: "I really cannot recommend Redfall to anyone"
When Cyberpunk is used as an example of good optimization "Perhaps I judged you too harshly."
@@scarlet_dani I dont like the game myself, its a 5/10 for me, a bigger bloated far cry lying to be a deus ex style game, with none of the social commentary and none of the immersive sim elements in level design.
The game isnt all terrible, but it should have launched in 2023 (like most of the devs expected) not 2020
Well the game basically was still in development for the last 3 years, and it shows. Now it's a game, not a fucking mess released way too early
@@caleb_widogast_fan that's true, but it's still a boring Far Cry clone with a bad story and miscast keeanu reeves so I still don't like it much
WE know the times are rough when we use Cyberbug 2077 as a quality mesure stick for those new games.
Getting real tired of finding out that every game I'm actually interested in is either broken, unfished, or a combination of both. Imagine if movies were released as unfished as modern $70 AAA games are?
Most modern movies are not unfinished - true!
They are just bland and soulless ;-)
Excellent work explaining the CPU core under utilization Alex!
Stay strong Alex. I know all these terrible PC ports are killing you
“Requires a health warning at the lowest settings”. Loooolllll😂
GPUs being unobtainable, PC ports being trash.... I think now is the time to finally go through my Steam backlog and give the games that actually deserve it a shot.
And play some indie gems! ;-)
Noone care about them because AAA publishers spend 100x of money for marketing their turd games xD
March 28th: Surely nothing will be worse than TLOU Part 1
April 27th: Surely nothing will be worse than Jedi: Survivor
May 1st: Surely nothing will be worse than Redfall
It says something about the state of the industry when Cyberpunk is being used as the good example.
To be fair, PC version of Cyberpunk has always been great, I played it at launch and had no significant issues. The engine is coded very well on PC - not just in how it uses CPU, but also how it seamlessly supports DSR and all the other features.
@@8Paul7 fr, Im sad that they're no longer using RedEngine. Im tired of Unreal engine
Especially when the video examples have the same ungodly pop in all over the place
Cyberpunk is the one that proves scum works, now everyone's doing it. Lol. Devs are doing the punk way to make the day. 😅
@@8Paul7 CP2077 doesn't even have proper AI.... stop bootlicking that terrible port
Is that Command and Conquer Music I hear in the background?
We have come at a point where Cyberpunk is more favourable in terms of optimization in comparison to the latest games. Remember two years ago what state it was in.
hang in there Alex! I'm sure this year can't give us any more horrible pc ports
Starfield is this year you know
It’s only May my friend. We haven’t even made it to the half way mark yet.
@@adamkallin5160 If Starfield is in a bad state when it's out, then imagine what it would have been like if released in 2022.
The graphics is on par with the game SWAT 4 from 2005, the only difference is that SWAT 4 would run with 900 fps and no stutters by now.
Our thoughts and prayers are with you Alex
Eh UE4 for dates back to 2015 when the consumer PC market was dominated by either 4 core 4 threaded CPU's or at best 4 core 8 threaded CPU's. So they made the engine optimized around this number of processors and threads. No one expected Ryzen to come in around 2017-18 and blow open the doors to high core counts with high clock speeds. So we are stuck with an 8 year old engine designed for Haswell era CPU's trying to make ambitious giant open world games that it can barely handle. Throwing cores at the problem does nothing, either they change the underlying engine code, which is very unlikely, or optimize every line of code to get better performance out of those single threaded scenarios, which is what I think they are scrambling to do atm.
Yeah, I have a feeling it's engine related too. So developers should have considered it while making the game... or games. Because this is not the only UE4 game suffering the same issue. Jedi: Survivor is having the issue as it was shown in the video too.
So they should have make compromises in some territories and calculate these issues in. If the engine is not capable of certain things then don't do it. Or develop on a different engine. Though UE4 is pretty easy to use and probably it's one way to rush a game out. Still needs a lot of time to develop something good but Arkane didn't even try here.
I love how you highlight these issues, keep up the good fight to get devs to do better, we appreciate it.
Alex bringing the CPU receipts! Haha, gotta love the data. Don't mind the comments so much though... And yup, sadly skipping redfall now :(
The Redfall launch trailer was edited to an epic version of Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. The first line of the lyrics used is: "Stuttering..."
The day has come that Cyberpunk 2077 is used as an example of good performance
Yep!
It was patched those 2 years many times ;-)
My biggest issue is the textures simply not loading in most of the time lol
I had no idea there was even textures in some parts. I was just standing there checking something and when i came back to the game, a nice message had appeared on the wall in front of me!
DF is the mothership for us consumers. LOVE EM!.
I had this on in the background but had to see for myself when he said "might require a health warning". Wow is that bad 😅
A modern game for a modern audience. Like poetry really
meh
It rhymes
Yup. Gaming has become to popular. Trying to reach too broad of an audience.
Ingoring the bugs,lack of optimization and being overpriced. this game is like millennial humor and constant parasitic quirky jokes every 10 mins. Not to mentiont he dudes that are skinny effeminte twinks, and the black women who entire personality is "student debt".....
The only game that has ever did any of that semi competently is borderlands and even that game (3 mostly) grates on the nerves and sadly borderlands popularized the millennial jokes/ personality.
@@keonkla sounds like Saints Row '22
It would be nice to see a technical deep dive into Unreal engine 4. I'm quite curious why this specific game engine causes so much trouble for game developers these days. It's also strange that these problems occur so late in the engine's life cycle. I remember that one of the first UE4 games was Gears 4 from 2016 which was super optimized. Gears 4 (and 5) still LOOKS and RUNS much better than Redfall. I don't know how we went from 4-8 GB of VRAM usage to 16 and 24 when games don't even look better or look downright worse. Gears of War 4 and Jedi Surviver are graphically comparable. Do a side by side, they are not that different. The difference: you only need like a 1070 to max out Gears on 1440p (maybe even 4k). Try that with Jedi Surviver without the latest patch and you get a 15 fps slideshow. It's like they're deliberately screwing around with PC gamers. Resident Evil 4 does not look any different from the RE2 and RE3 remakes and I played those games maxed out on my old 1070 with significant headroom to spare. Now I'm forced to use the 1GB low res textures with my 3070Ti because the game eats up a gazillion gigabytes of VRAM for no reason while looking EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE LAST 2 GAMES?! WTF?! 🤨
traversal stutters and multithreading issues are the same on consoles. its ue4 fault. i hate this engine so much
@@znubionek
Yes, but these issues were not really present on older titles (namely Gears 4 and 5 or even Fortnite) and the same goes for the RE engine. My guess it's not really the engine's fault. I mean Devil May Cry V runs on the RE engine too and the frame rate is sky high. Granted it has less advanced features implemented, but you really don't notice it during gameplay.
This year's PC games are reminding me of Pokémon games on Switch.
They released Sword/Shield and I thought "This is the bottom of the barrel"
Then they released Legends Arceus and I thought "OK, THIS is the bottom of the barrel"
Then Scarlet/Violet was released and I don't even know anymore.
PC is going the same route with TLOU > Jedi Survivor > Redfall
I like these reviews, they literally save your money.
They really do, and it’s free advice.
The absolute state of AAA games in 2023
On the whole I agree - but not ALL AAA games. I was very happy with HFW (9/10) and Burning Shores (9/10).
The fading out shadows and close look is an Engine Bug I reported to Epic over a year ago. The report got deleted a month after reporting it with no efforts taken ... Epic no longer cares about the games idustrie and bloats Unreal Engine with stuff for the movie industrie while breaking the engine more and more over the years.
Alex must've had a couple of stiff drinks when he knew he'd be having to tech review this one..........
his voice screams i just dont care anymore. i mean the sheer amount of terrible PC Ports this year is crazy
@@matthewjuarbe5826 the stutter-struggle era has given him ptsd. One more dodgy unreal engine shitshow and he's going full meltdown 😂
@@thepadster123 i never seen a gamin engine that is giving people so much trouble then Unreal Engine 4. every unreal engine 4 title suffers the same issues
Alex is such a bro. Puts in so much suffering to try to get the word out systematically and does what's in his power to try to get this stuff fixed
Stutter engine strikes back again !
I’m praying for Alex’s mental health when reviewing these suboptimal PC ports.
Once again, Alex leads the charge! These garbage PC ports need to stop!
Fascinating video, thanks Alex. BTW i loved the intro to the Jedi: Survivor video. Very funny!
Was thinking about picking this game up for PC as I love Arkane. I will definitly avoid it now. Thank you very much for making this kind of videoes and inform us about the poorly optimized games. This trend of releasing unfinished games need to stop!
Read some reviews etc?!
@@kraenk12 Normal reviews never go in technical detail as Alex does
ok... the "Worst PC Port Award" better NOT be a meme at this point. Make it happen DF. I will be there!
Devs could make 60 fps games like Call of Duty on the weak PS4 CPU, but not on much more powerful Ryzen CPUs? That makes no sense to me. Is there something wrong with Unreal Engine 4?
Well done Alex. A very honest Tech review.
Could you just do the same video (just change the title) for all pc developers going forward, It would save us all an age !!
Optimization tutorials are a thing, game engine consultants are a thing too ;-)
Current top 7 hitters worst PC ports
1. Jedi Survivor
2. The Last of Us Part 1
3. Dead Space Remastered
4. The Callisto Protocol
5. Resident Evil 4 remake
6. Atomic Heart
7. Redfall
Yea that was 7 lol.. more incoming for PC gaming in 2023
"The Master Race"
Specifically looks like other than CDPR, they do not know how to use the E cores properly. Heavily using one or two main threads with most of the rest of the processor remaining underutilized seems like a problem, too. Appreciate the focus on this
You can't even claim anymore that this is due to a "bad culture" or "bad planning". This shit is pure incompetence of the employees.
Or maybe the director , lead or boss, or the publisher that forces the developer to rush the game
Probably incompetence from the management. No way people on the inside didn't know their game wasn't ready. Phil Spencer said he wasn't aware of the poor state the game was in. Somebody hid stuff.
@@cedricpomerleau5586 listen dude... this game has many problems and you could say that performance issues were due to not enough time in the oven (I don't believe it as I explained in my 2nd post). But what about the rest? Did writers have not enough time to write good story and good quests? Did graphic designers have not enough time to make good character models? Did other devs have not enough time to set shadow casting correctly so that they don't vanish when you get closer? Like you people are so used to throwing rocks at management (they often deserce it) but you stay blind to clear fuck-ups of the lower tier employees. Yeah, due to the nature of things in the end managment is responsible for the product because they allowed it to be in certain condition but you people can't always ignore the employees that did shit-quality job. This game suffers from insane amount of incompetency on the team side.
Get um Digital Foundry! I’m glad that you all point this kind of thing out and make people aware of what’s going on with solid evidence. This type of behavior from the company’s that develop these games is awful. We as the consumer are expected to go out in droves and purchase faulty products that are substandard at best when it comes to bugs and performance. This isn’t only for game like red fall and Jedi survivor but many more of the course of 2022 and 2023. I know the people working to make these games for us work hard and it’s difficult to find out exactly who is at fault but in my field of work I am expected to deliver excellent service and I expect the same when being on the other end.
the original jedi ran like trash and yet still was lauded up as an amazing game that i guess sold in huge numbers.
Watch videos on TH-cam which called "What happun..." - it has a lot of insides on why so many games are released in state like this ;-)
Alex will be moving on to indie games in 2024, at this rate.
10:03 Thanks for finally including how much 30 fps cap reduces the stuttering 👍
Miss the times when games on old consoles couldn't be patched and you just bought the disc and didn't have to worry about the game being broken
Yeah, but back then, video games were very much less complex than modern video games. The complexities of developing modern videogames is insane, and it would take sooo much time to release them in a completely finished, bug-less state.
@@jonRock That statement has been so bullshit…
While the complexity of games has increased drastically, the software has been OVERLY simplified because of the evolution of technology. It’s gotten to the point where even some poor hobbyists is able to make a game with open source engines, and UE4. So you’re extremely flawed and wrong.
well many games were in fact broken, an honest look at the past show crap performance and weird bugs, sometimes non obvious, but they are there.
@@cowboylou optimization in what? PC? That’s not “complexity of making games” other than having to develop for a platform that’s not constant for its hardware.
PS5 games are coming quite polished for example.
The best Vampire game in the near past was Evil West! I had SO MUCH fun playing it!
It feels like publishers are doing everything they can lately to kill off PC gaming.
Because pc gaming is trash
I love the fact that Cyberpunk is mentioned as a good CPU Utilization Example, when there are, still up to this day, issues Utilizing the full power on some AMD Ryzen CPUs...
Its just a matter of time until Alex suffers a complete and utter mental breakdown and just spirals down into a crippling depression.
Damn, Alex sounds depressed. Hang in there, hope we'll get some better PC ports soon.
remember when cyberpunk was getting thrashed for very bad performance. well, it is now good enough that is the standard for comparison.
It was patched for 2 years ;-)
Really excited for the end of UE4. The traversal stutter has been an issue for years and only a few games really fixed the issue.