Is optimization a problem on modern consoles?

I'm asking because I don't own neither an xbox one nor a ps4 and I'm thinking whether I should buy one.

My biggest concern is performance. I heard quite a few complaints from games that don't run well on console, so I'm asking you guys who own one or both consoles if the issue is that serious or just blown out of proportions?

A problem? not necessarily, the consoles are weaker for their time than previous generations, but in general any optimization issues are more a product of rush jobs and incompetence. I know people on this forum love assuming that the devs can do no fucking wrong because they would sooner swallow the devs semen than hold them accountable, but reality is there is a lot of shoddy design in the triple A space, and that shows up in the polish department. Plenty of PC ports are reasonably optimized, but there are still noteworthy **** ups: Warn a Brothas MKX and Batman Arkham Knight last year, recently Rise of the Tomb Raider has this absurd frame skip if you have your textures on very high that bugs me to no end.

Then there are complicated answers: the nature of the game being a technical difficulty (though I don't think that's an actual excuse), and money running out on a project, and indie projects having their own issues. But I wouldn't call it a problem, it's just a small thing that shows up from time to time. There was a good stretch from late 2013 and 2014 where it felt like every other month there was a big time broken game releasing.

Blown out of proportions, there are some turds out there tho like Just Cause 3

Most are quite well optimized to run on the specific hardware the platforms have, so they get better performance than PC with the same parts would(in most cases).

The power of the consoles may be an issue but the console versions of games have been more "optimized" than PC versions. Thats why I bought games like Batman Arkham Knight on PS4 instead of PC. Rise of the Tomb Raider has been tough for PC users too. While the image quality isn't as high in Xbox One, the game performs pretty well.

I also know on Pc optimization can be a problem due to the infinite specs out there, but it's also often overcome by relying on the brute-force of the Pc to run a game. From a console I expect a game to run well, not expecting the kind of performance Pc can get.

So, I'm glad to hear from console owners that the often criticized poor console performance doesn't really affect the game as I also feared. (I only own a Wii U)

TC, if I were you I'd get both consoles through the end of the generation, when they both have anough exclusives to justify the purchase. That way you get to save money on both hardware and software.

If you're interested in mainstream games, get a console; that's devs' first priority. (look at Batman Arkham Knight)

I regret buying and playing PES 2016 on Pc, for instance. Also, I finished Rise of the Tomb Raider on Pc not without issues; yes on Pc it's more detailed, crispier and all, but it's absurd that the game runs better on my jurassic Xbox 360.

Games have never ran well on on console generally speaking. The difference is console players didn't know any better back then so no one talked about it. But now with the Internet we have all the information out there and people are breaking down performance stats so we know how bad a game dips. But if you go back and look at older games and the framerate people thought were acceptable back then. Like averaging the low 20s type performance. So overall today console games actually perform well when compared to the past. Devs can't lie to us anymore. We will know the inside and outside of performance at launch so the really try to hit those marks

No. Unlike many like to believe, we never had console games as stable and well optimized as we have now.

On PC optimisation is ruined by turds such as Nvidia promoting their own products by sabotage over consumers best interests.

Also there are a lot of porting companies that just don't give a **** because they will get paid regardless, they are only interested in easy money.

@ten_pints: That's unfortunately true, but the pros of Pc gaming outweighs the cons in the end. Sure, console exclusives often mark a generatiom, but so far I haven't been impressed by either Sony or Ms. Nintendo on the other hand never disappoints on the exclusive department, but they fail in other aspects.

Tomb Raider rough on PC users? First I'm hearing about this. Running fine on my computer with just about everything maxed.

Vram issues, the very high textures use up to 6gb of it. 970gtx being the most popular nvidia card which banks 3.5gb vram

@Randoggy: No you aren't. What did you turn down? What resolution? What frame rate?

I find that "maxed" and "just about maxed" have very loose definitions in the Internet.

Generally speaking consoles are much better optimized than PC. If you're interested in running games that peak performance however then high end PC is what you'd want to invest in.

Exactly. People need to be more familiar with the limitations of their rigs before complaining. Very high textures are 4K and are meant for cards with more than 4GB VRAM. I have a 980 Ti with 6GB VRAM and I am yet to see any stuttering with max settings @1440p. To claim the game is not optimized is silly because there are various settings catering to different specs.

In regards to the consoles... the hardware is shit and there are only so many optimizations that can be done. So, sacrifices need to be made. Unfortunately, most developers choose to sacrifice framerate in favour of graphics. I feel this is the wrong choice personally. Low framerate kills immersion much quicker than not having the flashiest graphics. You can still make a game that looks good and is immersive and have it run at 60fps. The problem is people expect the consoles to be powerful and offer these next generation graphics. The reality is they are garbage and there is a large rift between what the consoles are capable of and what people expect from them.

Optimization isn't really an issue on the consoles any more than it's ever been. There have been some bad ports and/or rushed games here and there, but that's about it.

The reality is the PS4 and Xbox One are not that powerful of machines. They aren't like the PS3/360 which had more unique architectures that took longer for developer to figure out how to maximize performance. The PS4 and Xbox One are basically PCs. The Xbox One flat out uses DirectX 12 and the PS4 uses something very DX-like. Their CPUs are the same and the RAM amounts are nearly identical. This meant developers were able to dive into what the consoles were fully capable of much sooner. Things will improve over time. The compilers will get better, techniques better suited for the specific hardware in the PS4/Xbox One will be released, and the API will continue to improve to reduce overhead.

However, the room for improvement isn't as much as last generation. The PS4 and Xbox One will be "maxed out" much quicker than previous generations. Already developers have to compromise.

I hope this generation only lasts for 5 years. If the consoles are going to release with weaker specs, we need to spend less time in the generation.

Almost every AAA you hear about performance issues on consoles. Long load times, blurry graphics, bad pop-in or inconsistent frame-rates. Reviewers keep claiming that PS4 or XB1 titles look great and I have seen with my own eyes that it's just not true.

@BassMan: But you aren't playing the game maxed at 60 fps. In fact you're hitting frames in the 40's. I am pro PC gaming but it bugs me to no end to see PC gamers in threads saying "I'm playing the Game maxed." There were tons of PC gamers like yourself getting owned on NeoGaf over this very topic and Herms here need to be held accountable as well. There are benchmarks run by rigs better than yours that don't run a locked 60 even at 1080p let alone 1440p. I know the hardware required to run 1440p games because that's the resolution I run. You are ether lying about being "maxed", have a loose definition of what "maxed" means or you have trouble seeing frame drops.

I am playing max settings without AA. I have a healthy OC on my 980 Ti also. The game is usually around 60fps on more demanding areas at 1440p. Sometimes it is above and other times it drops below. I have never dropped into the 40s that I am aware of. I also use G-Sync. So, minor drops below 60fps are not noticeable and have no negative effect on my experience. The game runs great for me. I don't see why my rig would struggle in any way to run at a locked 60fps at 1080p. Where are people experienceing these drops into the 40s?

I got dual 980Ti Strix's yet I still get hitching. Everything is cranked expect for textures which is set to high rather than very high. I believe I'm using SMAA but I can't be sure as I'm not at my PC. Resolution is 2560x1080.

Perhaps it is related to SLI? Try disabling SLI. Try without SMAA as well. I don't have stutter/hitching on my single 980 Ti. I also run the game off an SSD which may help.

I'm not game dev, but i haven't seen any probems with any game, except Fallout...

But max settings without AA isn't "maxed." You are turning something down. And AA still makes a very noticeable difference at 1440p. As for the performance at 1440p here are some benches. And this test rig is using a 6700K and DDR4 RAM. Their CPU gets 10 frames over yours as well soooooooooo.............

@GoldenElementXL said:

@BassMan said:

@GoldenElementXL said:

@BassMan: But you aren't playing the game maxed at 60 fps. In fact you're hitting frames in the 40's. I am pro PC gaming but it bugs me to no end to see PC gamers in threads saying "I'm playing the Game maxed." There were tons of PC gamers like yourself getting owned on NeoGaf over this very topic and Herms here need to be held accountable as well. There are benchmarks run by rigs better than yours that don't run a locked 60 even at 1080p let alone 1440p. I know the hardware required to run 1440p games because that's the resolution I run. You are ether lying about being "maxed", have a loose definition of what "maxed" means or you have trouble seeing frame drops.

I am playing max settings without AA. I have a healthy OC on my 980 Ti also. The game is usually around 60fps on more demanding areas at 1440p. Sometimes it is above and other times it drops below. I have never dropped into the 40s that I am aware of. I also use G-Sync. So, minor drops below 60fps are not noticeable and have no negative effect on my experience. The game runs great for me. I don't see why my rig would struggle in any way to run at a locked 60fps at 1080p. Where are people experienceing these drops into the 40s?

But max settings without AA isn't "maxed." You are turning something down. And AA still makes a very noticeable difference at 1440p. As for the performance at 1440p here are some benches. And this test rig is using a 6700K and DDR4 RAM. Their CPU gets 10 frames over yours as well soooooooooo.............

AA is just a preference and not a detail setting. I do not use AA on any of my games at 1440p. I find it is not necessary. I prefer more performance and less input lag. Also, every AA solution outside of MSAA seems to degrade image quality. So, I do not use it. I don't care about what those benchmarks say. Benchmarks are always with reference cards and stock clocks. I OC both my GPU and CPU. My CPU does not bottleneck my GPU. I get more performance than what it shows there. Perhaps I will have to make a twitch stream for you when I get home to prove it.

This is so true...Many are the times they claim performance over what benchmarks show even on superior GPU.

That say the PS4 and xbox can only go up to a point after that there is no optimization on the world that help them.

@BassMan: I'm not trying to be combative so you don't have to "prove" anything to me. Sorry if I have come off that way. I'm just asking questions about your performance vs what I've seen in benchmarks. I don't know first hand yet because I'm not playing on PC until I finish the Xbox One version. But I don't feel like not using AA is maxing a game and not using it still shows TONS on jaggies even at 1440p. I always use some sort of AA but never max it out because it blurs the image after a while. And like I've said, many have claimed "max performance" but 99% don't actually run games max. Not at a good frame rate anyway.

Do you stream often? I would love to support a fellow System Warrior in Twitch.

@GoldenElementXL: I have actually only streamed a few times because it lagged my connection when I was playing Battlefield. I only have 3 Mbps upload and I streamed at 720p/60fps @2.5 Mbps. The image quality is far from great at that bitrate. I don't want to drop the framerate either. So, I didn't bother streaming much after that.

I'll have another crack tonight. I'm running the latest drivers from Nvidia too and running from a 1TB SSD.

I'd say optimizations even worse for PC. Just looking at that tomb raider benchmark chart... 980ti, which is something like at least 3x the cost of a console on its own can't even hit 60fps at 1440p, which is a res you would expect a card like that to be able to hit 120fps or more.

Yet these consoles costing so much less can run this game at 20-25fps, which is half the framerate, but 3x less the cost of a 980ti.

I have a 970 gtx and with a fps of only 40 fps according to the benchmark, i wouldn't bother with this game. I can't play below 60 fps anymore. Im not sure why they don't optimize the game better because most pc gamers won't get a game that has a bad framerate.

Anti-Aliasing is a post process completely unrelated to the game itself.

Dont use system wars to gauge the game industry you will end of with an extreme view of how things actually are. There are no problems with optimization with consoles. Developing games for fixed hardware is and always will be a balance of trade offs.

Exactly, there is a mess of AA techniques and options. MSAA to FXAA to SMAA to TXAA to SSAA etc, each having pros and cons.

Personally I prefer higher resolutions and or higher pixel density to any form of AA. Generally speaking AA is just a way reduce the size of jaggies, where higher resolutions counter the problem requiring lesser need for AA to counter jaggies.

Maxing out a game on the PC usually referred to detail levels. Antialiasing and framerates are more of a preference thing.

Making a game on the PC look better than its console counterpart doesn't mean slamming every slider to the right. There is such a thing as an effect being overdone.

It depends on the dev and how lazy or good they are at working on their games for each platform it is released on.

If you take that game and do the bare minimum to get it working with a platform, then it is going to run like crap regardless of the hardware.

Batman Arkham Knight PC version is littered with PC politics e.g. the developers removed console's wet shaders for high resource consuming NVIDIA Gameworks version and there's no option to select the console version.

Reference http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-batman-arkham-knight-pc-lacks-console-visual-features

@GoldenElementXL said:

But max settings without AA isn't "maxed." You are turning something down. And AA still makes a very noticeable difference at 1440p. As for the performance at 1440p here are some benches. And this test rig is using a 6700K and DDR4 RAM. Their CPU gets 10 frames over yours as well soooooooooo.............

NVIDA G-Sync or AMD FreeSync reduces the need for "60 fps" e.g. tear free frame render between 30 to 60 fps with minmimal input lag.

Console optimization isn't nearly as bad as it is for the PC. The last major broken game for the console was AC: Unity but that game was broken for everything and system it released for. Yeah console's won't give you the prettiest or highest frame rate of 40 to 60 FPS but it is typically pretty stable. I mean we are about due to new consoles but that may not happen for another 2 years.

F.ex.

go play Batman AK using titan x x3 tri SLI,I7 SKLAKE ,16GB RAM,then compare console version,

you may know how about optimization of btwn current Gen.ps4,one & pc..

There are still plenty of broken games released on console. Just Cause 3 being a recent example. The fact that most demanding console games run at 30fps or less doesn't even make them an option if you have a decent PC.

Batman Arkham Knight PC version destroys the console version now. Yes, it was fucked on release, but it now plays good and looks amazing.

how broken does it have to be? Just Cause 3 was awful, Fallout 4 was pooper, there's plenty of more

Still falls short, Read http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-batman-arkham-knight-pc-performance-still-falls-short

From http://steamcommunity.com/games/208650/announcements/detail/128713039396595557 change log.

Just drop some settings. I'm playing it with a 970 and I'm getting between 50-70FPS, mainly high settings, 1920x1080.

And what do you think about Ubisoft's adding some adjustable settings on consoles? Do you see it as an added feature or more like an excuse to poor optimization?

The settings they are adding won't affect performance, they are just to disable post processing effects that people may not like. Those kind of settings on a console make a lot of sense since stuff like motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, and other "fluff" effects can be annoying to a lot of people and they are very rarely used as a gameplay mechanic.