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Best and worst optimized PC games?

F

futurefields

Diamond Member
What do you guys think are some of the best and worst optimized pc games? Meaning for the overall LOD and visual experience they provide, which games perform the best?
 
Just looking at games I've played recently:

Best:
Batman: Arkham City
Hitman: Absolution
Max Payne 3
Deus Ex: HR

Worst:
Duke Nukem Forever

Somewhere in between:
Bioshock Infinite (Looks absolutely amazing at times. Great art direction. Unforunately, the level of bloom was so bad that it distracted me quite often.)
 
cmdrdredd said:
I don't know whether it's the game or cause it's eating my VRAM, but Bioshock Infinite feels terrible sometimes.
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I find it will hang at times. I've got dual 6850s in crossfire but they still struggle with 1080p sometimes. I'll overhaul the rig next year probably. Problem is it needs new everything. Even my case is starting to fall apart, and the DVD drive is IDE.

The worst optimized games by far are the Microsoft Flight Sim series. FSX still struggles even on modern rigs.
 
Worst: Total War Shogun 2 and its epic load times. I mean EPIC. Minutes, not seconds. Also, it's not multithreaded very much. You'd think otherwise but noooo.
 
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mmntech said:
I find it will hang at times. I've got dual 6850s in crossfire but they still struggle with 1080p sometimes. I'll overhaul the rig next year probably. Problem is it needs new everything. Even my case is starting to fall apart, and the DVD drive is IDE.

The worst optimized games by far are the Microsoft Flight Sim series. FSX still struggles even on modern rigs.
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Yeah I never played FSX but I remember reading about it.

I had to run bioshock infinite at 1080p on my system and it still stuttered sometimes.
 
Deus Ex HR was supremely smooth.

Worst: if we're including MMORPGs, goes to Final Fantasy 14 easily. Never seen such a poorly optimized piece of crap.
 
Uhmmmm GTAIV had well noted issues on release for windows. I think it had "1" star rating on Amazon for it.
 
TERA, surely.

It's running on UE3, but I've played much smoother games on the UE3 engine with good graphics. They were not the same type of games of course, but TERA feels really badly optimized. There's a map called Cutthroat Harbor, and everyone in it (regardless of their systems hardware) won't get past around 30FPS or so, maybe 40 if you've got a GTX Titan or something along the line of a SLi or Crossfire setup. There's other maps where you can get maybe 50FPS, but you'd move some distance and you're suddenly in the low 40's again. That's pretty much without regard to the screen resolution too, or even in-game settings (even low settings don't help that much).

Additionally, the GUI is using Flash Player and many (including myself) report a significant performance decrease with the UI on (it can be removed in-game to take screenshots by pressing Ctrl + Z). That's the case for me, so when I go to a Banker and open up my bank's UI window my FPS goes from anywhere between 15 to 20. If I have both the bank's UI window and my inventory's window open at the same time I'm at a FPS crawl at around 10 or so (but also depends where I am located, it mostly happens in Velika, Kanstria and Kaiator, a bit less is Allamentheia).

That's at, or near maximum settings. Now the bigger problem is whatever I've tried (.ini values, and various other "fixes" posted all around the web about it) doesn't help much. Sometimes I do gain maybe up to 5 FPS with the so-called fixes, but it's usually negligible. I've also tried the absolute lowest in-game settings I could, and I still don't get past the 35FPS mark in most maps, with the occasional 45 or so when there's basically nothing going on-screen or very few mobs and no players happen to be around.

So, yeah, good game (I do really like it overall although it's nothing "mind blowing", it's just fun enough I'd say) but poorly optimized.
 
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For a F2P game I feel like Blacklight: Retribution performs pretty well while pumping out some pretty decent graphics. Nothing groundbreaking, but my rig runs it at like 150 frames per second and its one of the few games I play that has no hitching, no microstutter, no unexplainable choppiness etc...



As far as worst... I know some people think its a great engine but I really hate the way Far Cry 3 runs on my system. WHen I stand still and pan the camera around, I can whip around and it is perfectly smooth.

But when I try to run forward in a straight line, its like a bad joke. The microstutter literally makes me sick.
 
futurefields said:
I agree this game is very sharp and performs great even on low end hardware.
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yep, first few seconds there's some slowness, but after that pretty damn smooth no matter how much is going on.

BTW, 6 hours playing, only 18% done in this game.
 
its in my backlog still i started playing it long enough to make sure it runs. i beat arkham asylum about 3-4 months ago. also a great game. currently making my way through the visual bugfest that is Far Cry 3.
 
Saints Row 2: Has a pretty legendary reputation as a bad port. The game won't even run at the correct speed without tweaking using a third part app.

GTA4: Also known for running like absolute crap. The fact that its saddled with R*SC and GFWL didn't help its case either.

Bethesda Games: Their awesomenes is easily rivaled by their sheer technical incompetence. Bethesda, please take your coders out back and beat them to death with flaming badgers.

Obsidian Games: See Bethesda Games above
 
Best:
MP3
BF3
Alan Wake
Hitman Absolution
BFBC2
Medal of Honor Warfighter
COD series pretty decent for their system requirements
AC3

Worst:
NFS Most Wanted
Bioshock Infinite
GTA4
FC3
 
most optimized game: the original roller coaster tycoon. it will run on a pentium 90MHz well, it was programmed entirely in assembler or somesuch. Yes, it is old, but with what it does it is insanely efficient. Second to this would be winquake. The engine was pure genius to even run on the hardware it did.

worst optimized game: that would have to be cities XL. single threaded, and slows down more the longer I play it. Even at 3.4GHz with 16GB DDR3-1600 and an HD6850 it goes down to 1FPS and lower as I play it at 1440x900 with lowest settings. This is no matter how small the city I am building is.
 
WoW for some time could really be a bitch depending on which options were selected. I remember that shadows, for instance, did have a very dramatic effect and would slow down the game a lot. That's a few years ago, though, so it probably wouldn't matter with today's hardware anyway.


What about Metro 2033? I've never played it myself, but it's known as a very demanding game. Are its requirements in line with its visual quality?

I guess that Minecraft could be considered poorly optimized as well. 😀

As far as nicely optimized, the Battlefield series is indeed quite good. I do remember BFBC2 🙂wub🙂 running very well and looking great.
 
Metro 2033 is probably the worst optimized game in history. It runs 10x worse than Crysis and other games while looking 1/10th as good.
 
Not that most people would notice since it still runs fine on most modern PCs, but minecraft runs like absolute shit considering how awful and simply its graphics are. You'd think it would run fine on netbook level hardware for what it is, but nope!
 
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