Five mistakes that can completely ruin a PC game that developers keep making

The PC version of the game is a process that is very simple today more than ever. There is an explanation for this, which is that although development continues to focus on consoles, they no longer use fully customized hardwarespecial and distant from PC components, in fact the opposite is true as many of our readers know.

Think PS4 and Xbox One mount one AMD Jaguar CPU and Radeon HD 7000 series GPUtwo components that arrived in the PC world years ago, and the same goes for the PS5 and Xbox Series XS that they use Zen 2 processors and Radeon RX 6000 series graphics. It is true that they have a semi-custom design, because they need to be adapted to the particularities of the console, but in the end the basis is the same and the huge differences that they have presented, for example, the IBM Cell CPU that mounted the PS3 or the PowerPC CPU with an integrated Xbox 360.

The fact is that despite this convergence that has occurred at the hardware level between consoles and PCs, we still find many cases today where the adaptation of a game to PC presents problems that can affect many aspectsand which in some cases become so severe that they can completely spoil the experience.

We have already talked about this topic on previous occasions, but today I want to focus on explaining it to you five fundamental mistakes that the developers continue to commit to porting the game to PC and that they are in the news after the huge fiascos we suffered after the launch of Gotham Knights and The Callisto Protocol, two titles that raised a lot of expectations and which in the end, have far less than expected .

1.-Lack of support for ultra-wide monitors

Enjoy PC gaming with an ultra-wide monitor it’s a pleasurethat is clear, but therein lies the problem not all support this format natively. This usually leaves us with two options, playing with the black edges or resorting to third-party programs, which usually work, but do not always achieve a fully optimal result.

It should be clear to the developers that for the optimal porting of the game to PC it is necessary to take into account that not all of us use the same type of monitor and that the 21:9 format has a significant presence in the gaming world. It can’t be that difficult to support this format, and it’s not acceptable that in mid-2023 we still find triple-A titles that don’t support it.

Introduce an option in the graphics configuration settings that come with PC games that allows you to change the format should be mandatoryand I’m convinced that buying this type of monitor would kick in enormously.

2.-Porting a stuttering game to PC is a pain

Unfortunately, stuttering has become very common, although to be fair, it has to be recognized that this also applies to consoles, and that even the most important titles couldn’t get rid of him. One example I always give is Bloodborne, a game that I consider a work of art, but unfortunately suffers from such intense stuttering that I am unable to play it for more than a few hours without ending up with a severe headache.

When we talk about stuttering, we mean stuttering. This is usually caused by frame desynchronization, and it causes us to notice tearing in the image even though the game is running at a high frame rate. It can also happen when the shader compiler is not working properly, in which case the jerks will be much more pronounced, so much so that the image may even freeze intermittently for a second or two.

Callisto Protocol and Gotham Knights are two recent examples that highlight how not to use the shader compiler. This must work sooner or asynchronouslyor a combination of both options to prepare the necessary shaders before they are used and not the moment they are displayed because they will have to be loaded and the stuttering we talked about will occur.

The shader translator is one of the mainstays of any modern game and also one of the more technical topics of this article. Its complexity is undoubted, but it is also evident that its correct execution It only depends on the work and effort of the developerwe only need to look at how well Days Gone has fared on PC despite being an adaptation of the PS4 version and using the Unreal Engine 4 graphics engine to realize this.

3.-Low CPU usage

Days Gone takes full advantage of the powerful GPU while consuming very little CPU.

The GPU is the key to determining the performance of a PC game, but so is the CPU. We already talked about this topic in one of our last guides, where we explain what processor we need for each graphics card. If we have a very powerful graphics card and complement it with a low-end processor, we create a bottleneck, but poor optimization and sloppy development can put us in the same situation even if we have a powerful CPU.

When DirectX 12 came out, and also when Vulkan started to be used in very important titles, it seemed that developers would finally get their act together in terms of optimization and that processors with more than four cores it would make sense to play on PC. The truth is that the situation has improved, today we can find games that scale well on six-core and twelve-thread processors, but there is still a long way to go.

We can find well-optimized games that scale quite reasonably on multi-threaded CPUs, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but also disasters like Battlefield 2042, a game so poorly optimized that it suffers from a huge CPU-level bottleneck, so much so that it doesn’t end up using high-performance graphics cards. I still remember when I tried it and saw that at 1440p, with max quality and ray tracing, using the RTX 3090 Ti and Ryzen 7 5800X, the GPU utilization rate was between 50 and 70 percent.

I understand that part of the problem is that when a game is ported to PC and has been modified from the console version, It’s easiest to start from the technical base of it and not worry too much about improvements or optimizations. When such a base is marked by an old generation console that has an ancient AMD Jaguar CPU, the bottleneck that can be produced is huge, and Battlefield 2042 is the best example we have today. It goes without saying that this has to change, and that once the transition to the Xbox Series X and PS5 is complete, things should improve.

4.-Very bad optimization that triggers hardware requirements

It’s a topic I wanted to separate from the previous one because ultimately the problems we see in terms of CPU-level optimization are so severe that deserves a separate article. This is not to say that other optimization problems are not serious, but that they are a step lower on the scale of importance and can be explained more generally and summarized.

There are many reasons why a game can be poorly optimized, but one of the most common is without a doubt disinterest and little effort developers when adapting the project and moving it to PC. In most cases, it is a question of cost, because by limiting this process, game adaptation becomes cheaper and the cost-benefit ratio can be improved.

As I said before when talking about low CPU issues, this is necessary when porting a game to PC polish the code and implement optimizations which enable the use of components and technologies available on the said platform. If the game is not using the PC’s resources, its performance will be disastrous, even if it is run on a very powerful computer.

This low optimization can also end up triggering requests and even generate stability issues. In this sense, one of the most important examples is what is known as “memory leak” (“memory leak” or “memory leak”) that causes the game to not release memory when it no longer needs it, so consumes more and more memory. If we have a lot of memory, we may not have serious problems, but on more limited computers, it can be game over or even crash the computer.

5.-Several graphics settings and their poor scale

This also often happens, and Battlefield 2042 is once again a prime example. When we have few graphics settings, porting the game to PC becomes more difficult because we have less options that we can adjust to improve game performance and better adapt it to the strength of our team.

When these graphics settings don’t scale well in performance or image quality, we find ourselves with an even more serious problem its value is practically zeroand we have a game in our hands that not only looks almost the same at low quality and at maximum quality, but also offers practically the same performance.

On the other hand, a game that allows us to modify many things on a graphical level, which is a significant difference with the mentioned modifications, both in terms of graphic quality and performance, is really amazing because it adapts much better to different computers and different hardware configurations. Some games even dare to go further and allow us to see the impact of different graphics settings in the game without having to close the menu, such as Days Gone, which personally seems like an achievement.