What am I doing wrong? Issues with my PC games

Ok so I built my PC in 2010 - Phenom II X4 955, AMD 6850, 8 GB 1600 Mhz RAM

Anyways, I didn't game much since I was in my junior and senior year of college so these are the games I have played

- Mass Effect 1 - 3

- Team Fortress 2

- Darksiders 1 and 2

and some other games here and there.

With the exception of TF2, for every one of those others games I had to do extensive modification via .ini tweaks or SweetFX, to even setting the Affinty on Darksiders 2 to use 2 cores so that it didn't stutter every 2 seconds.

It kinda took the enjoyment out of playing those games since I had to tweak so much. Mass effect 2 was the only game from that list that I just forced AA through catalyst and all was good.

Anyways, do you guys experience this with most of your games? why dont devs just have ingame settings for this?

I really want to know going forward because if I have to keep doing this with most of my games, then I think PC gaming may not be for me.

I don't think my case is the norm, and most of those games I played were console ports. However I do want to be certain.

All help is appreciated. Thanks.

No idea why you need to tweak so much.

I install a game, go into settings to make sure my resolution is correct and the volume levels are how I like them, and then hit PLAY and enjoy.

@KalDurenik: Yup all drivers are up to date. Checked via Steam Update Drivers option. I have been reading up and it looks like those games have been bad console ports. Just wondering if there are more bad console ports than good.

Welcome to the consolization of gaming.

What OS are you running and how old is it? May want to do a fresh start.

Mass effect 1-3 runs fine with slower dual cores 2gb of ram and AMD 4850/8800GT's

Not really.

Both Darksiders 1 and 2 and also the Mass Effect Series were good ports.

I think you're just trying to tweak too much or something wrong on your system.

Windows 8. I was runnning 7 up until a yr ago, then did a fresh install of 8

Yeh you might be right on this one. I managed to change the .ini file in mass effect 1 and it now runs smoothly. Apparently ppl said there was a texture streaming issue. But I dont htink many ppl experienced it. So its probably something wrong with my system. I might just do a complete reinstall or something.

Windows 8 may be the part of the problem, ive see people had problems with ME1 with 8,

That kinda explains things. Because I played ME1 back on Windows 7 and didn't have any issues, but I thought since the ME1 version I played on Windows 8 was part of the Mass Effect Trilogy, that they may have updated it in some way.

Either way I hope other games run fine for me. I have no issues with Valves games, and I just checked and Batman AA runs fine.

Good. Just try to get ME1 running smooth and play through it then if all the other games run fine.

Also, install Windows 8.1 Update, might fix the issue.

Thanks for the advice, guys. I appreciate it.

I've had a lot of problems running the Mass Effect series and Dragon Age on my windows 8 PC.

They weren't really performance issues, it was more of the games failing to start up and requiring that I rename folders and such, but I do know those games can be weird with Windows 8.

But to answer your question that is not normal for PC gaming. 99% of the time I just install the game, make sure the video setting are how I like them to get the FPS I want and I play it with now hassle.

all those were console ports, i find those run really bad sometimes. My pc specs are way above yours and i even saw some stuttering in darksiders 1 and 2 at some points. I never played mass effect on pc, but from what i read in forums, its port was bad or below average on all them.

things should get better i hope now that next gen consoles have 8 cores, hopefully games will use them more on pcs along side them. even now most games i played this year have only used 2 cores sometimes 3.

i'm playing civ 5 a few months ago waiting for a long turn to end, i flicked to task manager and see it only using 2 cores, its pretty frustrating to see a pc only game, using just 2 cores in 2013.

i agree with u a lot with having to edit ini settings with console ports... this is a big problem with many ports i've played. I remember having to edit Alice Madness Returns ini file a lot to get it to unlock the framerate and get it to play without so much lag... that was also a very bad port... much of the physx settings had to be editted to get them working decently also.

some ports run fine, i played the Rayman ports and they ran perfectly so far.