Most optimized and unoptimized PC games of 2016

So ever year DSO rank PC games based on their performance, here are the lists for most optimized and unoptimized PC games that released in 2016

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Most optimized

10.) Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a game that saw noticeable improvements via its post-release patches. NIXXES has added support for DX12 that improved performance on a variety of scenes (that were limited by the increased draw calls in DX11)

9.) Forza Motorsport 6: APEX

Forza Motorsport 6: APEX impressed us. Contrary to Forza Horizon 3, Forza Motorsport 6: APEX was not plagued by single-thread issues (although it scaled mostly on two CPU cores/threads).

8.) F1 2016

F1 2016 is also a racing game that impressed us. Powered by Codemasters’ EGO Engine, F1 2016 scales amazingly well on multiple threads, looks beautiful, and runs well on a variety of systems.

7.) Shadow Warrior 2

Shadow Warrior 2 runs and looks great on the PC platform. While the game suffered from some scenes that were a bit unoptimized, it can be fully enjoyed with more than 60fps even on dated PC systems.

6.) Tom Clancy’s The Division

While Tom Clancy’s The Division was downgraded from its initial reveal, Massive Entertainment’s title is still a great looking title.

5.) Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst

Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst is powered by DICE’s amazing Frostbite 3 Engine. As such, the game scales incredibly well on multiple CPU cores/threads

4.) Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Believe it or not, we were utterly surprised by the PC version of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is easily one of the most optimized PC games of 2016 as it can take advantage of numerous CPU cores/threads – while at the same time running with more than 70fps on modern-day dual-core

3.) Battlefield 1

Battlefield 1 remains one of the most beautiful PC games of 2016

2.) Gears of War 4

Gears of War 4 runs amazing on the PC, is one of the most beautiful games, comes with a plethora of graphics settings to tweak, features a detailed built-in benchmark tool, and is the best title to showcase DX12

1.) DOOM

DOOM is beautiful and runs amazingly fast on the PC platform, and it’s the most optimized PC game of 2016. (engine id Tech 6)

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Most unoptimized

5.) Far Cry: Primal

Once upon at time, the Dunia Engine was among the most ambitious engines out there. Fast forward a couple of years and here we are today with an engine that suffers from major single-thread CPU issues

4.) Space Hulk: Deathwing

Space Hulk: Deathing is perhaps the only Unreal Engine 4-powered title that performs so poorly on the PC, and that’s a real shame. Whether a DX12 (or a Vulkan) patch will resolve the game’s performance issues remains to be seen.

3.) Forza Horizon 3

Forza Horizon 3 suffers from major performance issues on the PC. Contrary to Forza Motorsport 6: APEX, Forza Horizon 3 is plagued by single-thread CPU issues and noticeable stuttering (that is even worse than the one some PC gamers witnessed in Forza Motorsport 6: APEX).

2.) Mafia III

Mafia III is a blurry mess, looks underwhelming, its lighting system is so old-gen-ish, features a city that does not appear more alive than GTA V’s Lost Santos or Watch_Dogs 2’s San Francisco, and runs worse than both of these open-world titles.

1.) Dishonored 2

Dishonored 2 is the most unoptimized PC game of 2016. This can be easily described as the “Batman: Arkham Knight” of 2016(engine id Tech 5)

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http://www.dsogaming.com/editorial/top-10-most-optimized-pc-games-of-2016/

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/here-are-the-five-most-unoptimized-pc-games-of-2016/#more-94290

Seems about right, Doom ran like silk.

let's not forget that it's initial release was also using denuvo anti tamper , id tech 6 is surely an amazing engine unlike it's predecessor id tech 5 that ruined Dishonored 2

Egh, I'm inclined to not agree with this, the game runs great.

Great thread

I'd go with Battlefield 1 as for the most optimized one, presenting that significant amount of detail with that level of frame rate is simply incredible, i know many ppl would go with Doom but i think BF1 is a more of an accomplishment.

Mafia 3 is the most unoptimized one imo, you're overstating the problems of Dishonored 2, no way it's even close to Batman AK

Overall, pretty good year.

Doom is a great example

@dynamitecop: however you have a CPU with awesome single thread performance, and fx users will find the game runs like arse.

well I'd rather replace with Deus EX: MD , it still suffers from stuttering problems and asking for too much VRAM

Hmm shame with Dishonored 2 as it's a Kb/m kind of game imo. And an Id tech game, so weird.

Doom run amazing. Absolutely amazing. kudos to id Software to create a Masterpiece like this we saw once in decade. last time FPS was this good was Half life 2.

also as great as tomb raider run. it happen to be one of the worst game i have ever played. disgusting game.

i just saw doom in 4K running on a 1080. my god thats a stunning bit of tech. any chance we can have the next elder scrolls game running on that instead of the piece of crap fallout 4 ran on?

Far Cry 4 used to have issues back when I used Windows 7. But, not anymore since switching to Windows 10. Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal all use the same engine. So what gives with Primal? I haven't bought it because no bang bang bang.

I don't have issues with Far Cry 4 nowadays. If one of the cores is hitting 80%, that's about it. No issues with gameplay.

I'm still going to say that I disagree as you can clearly see the CPU fall off when quitting the game, it's utilizing the main core the most as do nearly all games at about 65-70% usage, on five other cores at 30-35%, and then the two remaining at about 10-15%.

Also, VRAM usage is not an issue, with the game running at Ultra settings with 4x MSAA it is topping out at 3,862 MB's.

Honestly I feel as if you're taking a negative personal experience and generalizing it, this game runs fine. it should not be on this list, it's utilizing the hardware just as it should be.

@dynamitecop said:

@the_master_race said:

@dynamitecop said:

@the_master_race said:

3.) Forza Horizon 3

Forza Horizon 3 suffers from major performance issues on the PC. Contrary to Forza Motorsport 6: APEX, Forza Horizon 3 is plagued by single-thread CPU issues and noticeable stuttering (that is even worse than the one some PC gamers witnessed in Forza Motorsport 6: APEX).

Egh, I'm inclined to not agree with this, the game runs great.

well I'd rather replace with Deus EX: MD , it still suffers from stuttering problems and asking for too much VRAM

I'm still going to say that I disagree as you can clearly see the CPU fall off when quitting the game, it's utilizing the main core the most as do nearly all games at about 65-70% usage, on five other cores at 30-35%, and then the two remaining at about 10-15%.

Also, VRAM usage is not an issue, with the game running at Ultra settings with 4x MSAA it is topping out at 3,862 MB's.

Honestly I feel as if you're taking a negative personal experience and generalizing it, this game runs fine. it should not be on this list.

FH3 was a disaster at launch. It has improved with patches, but you still have to set process priority to low and turn off the core 0 affinity to get it to run the best. Urban areas still have shit performance and you can not hold 60fps in those areas. Stop defending broken games just because they are MS titles. Need to call a spade a spade. I don't care who published it.

BF1 should not be on the list for most optimized games. There have been a lot of performance issues for multiplayer. Some of the maps are just straight up terribly optimized in certain areas and you will suffer massive frame rate drops and frame pacing issues.

@dynamitecop said:

@the_master_race said:

@dynamitecop said:

@the_master_race said:

3.) Forza Horizon 3

Forza Horizon 3 suffers from major performance issues on the PC. Contrary to Forza Motorsport 6: APEX, Forza Horizon 3 is plagued by single-thread CPU issues and noticeable stuttering (that is even worse than the one some PC gamers witnessed in Forza Motorsport 6: APEX).

Egh, I'm inclined to not agree with this, the game runs great.

well I'd rather replace with Deus EX: MD , it still suffers from stuttering problems and asking for too much VRAM

I'm still going to say that I disagree as you can clearly see the CPU fall off when quitting the game, it's utilizing the main core the most as do nearly all games at about 65-70% usage, on five other cores at 30-35%, and then the two remaining at about 10-15%.

Also, VRAM usage is not an issue, with the game running at Ultra settings with 4x MSAA it is topping out at 3,862 MB's.

Honestly I feel as if you're taking a negative personal experience and generalizing it, this game runs fine. it should not be on this list, it's utilizing the hardware just as it should be.

It's not my list man

http://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/forza-horizon-3-pc-performance-analysis/

and I said I'm having VRAM problem with Deus Ex not forza

Dishonored 2 is the most unoptimized game? Well it runs particularly well on my generic GTX 960 without any problems whatsoever. If that its the worst then PC gaming is beaming.

I don't think you understand the meaning of the word disaster. Too much drama queens on the internet.

Oh be quiet, everything you say is hyperbole... You are the worst "PC gamer" I've ever encountered with your bullshit diatribe...

Look at your total over-dramatics... "disaster", "broken game"... And then worst of all you pigeon-hole the fact that it's a Microsoft game as if that has anything to do with it instead of the realization that it's utilizing hardware correctly..

@Pedro: @dynamitecop: FH3 was a disaster. Some people couldn't even get the game to load as it would get stuck on the title screen. The game would frequently crash. Stuttering/hitching and massive frame rate drops. CPU bottlenecks due to crappy load distribution on cores/threads. Massive input lag and unoptimized controls at lower frame rates. If that is not classified as a disaster, I don't know what is.

Have a look at the launch disaster:

I was pretty sure that Dishonored 2 & Deathwing will be unoptimized games. For me the surprises were XCOM 2 and Gears of War 4.

Sad thread my friend. Take 2 ruined Illusion Softworks, treated them like a third-world country. This was more painful than performance of Mafia 3.

@kozio: True that, the game was plagued with tons of issues.

Doom for me. It worked great and I had no issues with it at all.

FH3 pc version is absolute garbage lol

Dishonered 2 had crap engine, last one used Unreal engine, which is awesome. New Unreal engine +awesome.

But, they decide to use cack.

For reference, the 8th spot benchmark (F1 2016). Maxed out on 1080p just on a GTX 970.

It probably would have been higher had the rain effects not hit the performance so hard. Shame it doesnt have VR support...

Funny thing is I just impulse bought Arkham Knight on the PC.. And for a train wreck of a game from launch from what I heard, they sure as hell fixed it because I am pulling on average 80 to the max 90fps at max settings at 1080p in the out door areas.. All NVidia features on with my 1060.. Don't see any noticeable drop in fps either when you hit the batmobile.. Lowest I saw it go was in the 40's in the benchmark when it came to the NVidia smoke effects.. I remember the days back in pc games when games released broken, they stayed broken, my how times have changed on the pc.

Are we just going to pretend that alot of the problems didnt come from people with weaker PC builds trying to run the game at low spec? For example

Specs for the Video.

GPU: GeForce GTX 970

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 760 @ 2.80GHz

Memory: 8 GB RAM (7.97 GB RAM usable)

Current resolution: 2560 x 1440, 96Hz

Here are the recommended specs for 1080p

Operating system: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

• CPU: Intel Core i7 3820 @ 3.6GHz
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or NVIDIA GTX 1060 (AMD R9 290X or AMD RX 480)
• VRAM: 4GB
• RAM: 12GB
• Hard Drive Type: HDD
• Available Space: 55GB
• Resolution: 1920 x 1080
• Windows Version: Windows Anniversary Edition 64-bit 14393.101

Do you see the problem ? First this guy is trying to run the game at 1440, while his specs dont even meet the recommended for 1080. This is the same thing we talk about in treads where people paste these potato pc builds for $400 because they are trying to beat a console. This problem is completely created by the user yes they can make some allowances for bad PC's but there is only so much they can do. This is the problem with PC gamers as a whole, no you cannot get away with an I5 for the rest of 2016 and 2017 stop trying to be cheap and build a PC that will support the games you are trying to play.

Second threads are not cores. A core can have multiple threads, in Consoles there is only a single thread per core.

@spitfire-six: ... That pc is indeed weak due to the processor over anything else.. But that being said that game should not require a 1080 for the kinds of visuals we are seeing at 1440p.. There are better looking games out there that run on weaker hardware than that.. So going to have to go with alittle bit of A and alittle bit of b here.

@spitfire-six: I had similar stutters and hitches with my rig which usually chews up any game. The game had massive issues when it launched. I no longer get the stutters, but still get large dips below 60fps in that tram area. Even people with i7 6700K and Titan X Pascal can not run this game without performance issues and dips below 60fps. It comes down to shit optimization.

I am not saying the game did not have issues, I am saying the magnitude of those issues is being HIGHLY exaggerated.

@sSubZerOo Yea its weak cpu, weak system memory, coupled with trying to run to much resolution. The point I am making is alot of these videos and complaints you see are from people who make those same potato build threads and then they are shocked when a game does not perform well then blames the games "optimization". Its ridiculous.

@spitfire-six: How are those stutters/hitching highly exaggerated? People with much more powerful builds than the guy who made the video experienced the same issues. That shit is unacceptable and there is no need to downplay it.

I ran Doom maxed out at like 120 fps constantly at 1440p with my GTX 1080. Performed like a beast while still looking great.

Those stutters in the in the video are user configuration induced. Are those stutters driver or engine induced? Is the game performing with the expected resources? The people with high end rigs that experience the same problems I get it, it sucks and it got fixed. The exaggeration is that the game was completely broken. I played the game at launch on my 980ti and 5820k with no issues. If the game was completely broken this would not be possible. A completely broken game does not work for anyone.

It is unrealistic to expect that all PC games wont have bugs and issues especially when the studio is new to PC gaming and issues related to Nvidia Drivers and AMD drivers. I am not downplaying I am trying to be realistic in a thread full of hyperbole. Again I am not talking about every complaint made against the game I am just saying that a number of those complaints are user induced issues which in theory you make your code more robust, but that will not always be the case.

From my experience: Overwatch is the most optimized game, the most un-optimized is Mafia 3.

You say the issues are user induced, but yet they get fixed in a patch. You are contradicting yourself. Your 980 Ti and 5820k makes for a high end rig that far exceeds the recommended specs for most games and is more powerful than the vast majority of other rigs. I am glad that you were happy with the performance at launch, but most people were not. There were a lot of users with capable rigs that struggled to run FH3 properly. Many users were having a wide variety of problems and that is why it made the list of most unoptimized games. A lot of people just gave up on the game and got a refund.

I don't care if this was the first PC release for Playground Games. They had the backing of Microsoft and they should have been given the necessary resources to have a proper release. MS made sure that Gears 4 was very well optimized on PC. They should have done the same for FH3. Broken and unoptimized games is a very bad trend in gaming right now. The 'patch it later' mentality of publishers is a slap in the face to customers and is unacceptable.

No, I said user configurations were the cause of the stutter. The patch introduced a workaround that will account for people running systems with low system memory and better make use of the gpu memory controller. The combination of the way the game utilizes system memory in cases of gpu memory buffer overflow AND users who had ~8 gb of system memory is what cause a majority of the stutter issues. They made changes to mitigate the issue but that does not mean that running the game with 8gb of memory is ok. So no it is not a contradiction and this is why it was only present in some PC's.

The second part of your statement is just filled with emotional outrage. Playground games had the resources they need, what you are talking about is bug, The Coalition and Playground games are two different developers with different employees with varying experience. Microsoft does not Micromanage studios/teams down to that level of detail to account for every bug in the code that is ridiculous. Code will at best have 80% coverage and as it scales in complexity that remaining %20 grows. I am not asking you to feel bad for anyone I am just explaining to your why your expectations are unreasonable. There should be very few severe bugs that completely break the game, and we have seen a few of those this generation. Stuttering and other things people attribute to a game being broken is just not accurate.

Everyone I know personally who played the game on PC had the stuttering and we all have different hardware. There was outrage on the Forza forums with few users claiming to be able to run the game properly. The issues were widespread. You mentioned the workaround which is essentially optimization. There is no reason why my system with i7 3770K @4.5 Ghz, 16GB DDR3 2133, and a GTX 1080 should have had any stutters. I barely played the game until the performance was improved and I considered refunding the game myself.

In regards to emotional outrage... Yes, I am pissed at half-ass releases. It is the publishers responsibility to do proper QA on titles. Sure, there may be some odd compatibility issues with certain configurations that you can not account for, but widespread issues should be resolved before release. My expectations for a fully functioning product are not unreasonable. I can accept that certain games are better than others in terms of design, graphics, sound, etc., but all games should be technically sound at launch. Broken and unoptimized games at launch just shows incompetence and lack of respect for consumers. Games should not be released until they are finished. We should not be used as beta testers after the product has gone gold.

I find the games industry abuses online connectivity and patching ability these days. Imagine if the auto industry regularly rushed out their cars knowing there were serious issues with core components like engines and transmissions... and they were like.... no worries, we can just recall them later. That would be corporate suicide. The games industry pulls that shit all the time because they feel they can get away with it. Minimal costs for post-release patches and they get to hit their release dates without having to re-work their marketing campaign. However, you can only abuse people for so long before they catch on and start to fight back. It's nice to see sales suffer for games like Assassin's Creed Syndicate due to how broken Assassin's Creed Unity was. I like how Ubisoft is refocusing its strategy as a result.

Meanwhile the most powerful console to have ever been created runs the title made by so called greatest dev of all time run at 24 FPS, LMAO.

I have FH3 ,DH2 and Spacehulk lmao. Forza runs pretty good on my PC I have zero complaints about its performance. Dishonored 2 I been lucky with also , it does slow down in towns with big spaces but not too badly the instances where it happened weren't killing my immersion that's for sure. And I havent started Spacehulk yet but I hear it's bad. Now how did No Man's Sky miss this list? That was hot garbage , constant stuttering to the point of being unplayable.

My PC has i76600

1070 msi armor

32 GB RAM

Z170 mobo Asus

I play games on Ultra at 1080p ,perhaps why my performance isn't too hindered on Forza and dishonored

I wasn't expecting to run Forza Horizon 3 with everything at its highest on my GTX 980 and 3770k CPU but those stutters were just horrible. Turning the graphics down didn't help either so I had to cap the FPS to 30. But even that wasn't perfect, capping it created input lag that wasn't ideal for the off-road racing. I haven't played it since after the first two patches came out so I don't know if its any better.

I missed all the launch headaches. I just picked it up a few weeks ago when I got my Asus Strix RX 480, and with an i5 3350P and 8GB DDR3-1600, I'm getting fps in the 40s with 4K res and high settings (though shadows on Ultra because the shadow at the rear of the car was bugging me). I'm not noticing any stuttering either, aside from when it's doing those dramatic shots when you're leaving a festival location, before you have control.

@dynamitecop: your sig fit your post perfectly.