PUBG poor optimization good for gaming?

[Hendrickson]

Clickbait thread title aside, I was thinking about this the other day. Is the fact that PUBG runs like a pig been good for hardware manufacturers, and the PC gaming community as a whole?

I have personally had to upgrade 3 systems (wife's, friends, and family members) just to be able to play PUBG at reasonable visual quality, and framerates. Without this game, it probably would have been a couple of years before any of these systems saw an upgrade. That's the part that is good for the hardware manufacturers. The part that's good for the gamers, is that now they are enjoying a better gaming experience on the other games they play, and at least with a couple of them, has had them branch out to some other games that they probably wouldn't have tried a few months ago.

I'm not advocating for poorly optimized games, but it seems like we need a title like this every couple of years, that's basically a must play title, but is going to push people to upgrade their hardware. It seems like it's been awhile since we have had a title like this.

I'm hoping that this game will continue to increase in popularity and become one of the standard esports titles, like CS:GO, DOTA, Rocket League, LOL, etc. Those games have certainly done good things for computer gaming, but PUBG could really push the hardware side forward like none of the other esports titles have, and push manufacturers to release faster, cheaper hardware on an accelerated schedule.

 

[schmedy]

I didn't have to upgrade but did just because. It was a toss up between CoffeeLake and Ryzen, but thanks for FS/Trade here I went to Ryzen. I am on the fence of doing a video card, but the damn miners have killed the price of them for some time.

 

[Rebel_L]

If a game wants upgrades because it is poorly optimized I think thats overall bad for the gaming community and while a few diehard fans will upgrade for the game I think you get more people that will just skip it altogether. Having a game that pushes the graphics envelope using all the latest DX features to need new hardware is what I think that game that causes people to upgrade should be. If the game doesnt look better than older games once you do the hardware update, that is just a disappointment to me.

 

[schmedy]

I hear you and agree, but there are so few games out there. I have been a BF fan since 1942, but BF1 is a POS with crate purchases, cheating everywhere, and slow promotions. I am really hoping as PubG goes to 1.0 they fix a lot of the issues, but doubt it.

 

[Hendrickson]

If a game wants upgrades because it is poorly optimized I think thats overall bad for the gaming community and while a few diehard fans will upgrade for the game I think you get more people that will just skip it altogether. Having a game that pushes the graphics envelope using all the latest DX features to need new hardware is what I think that game that causes people to upgrade should be. If the game doesnt look better than older games once you do the hardware update, that is just a disappointment to me.

I would agree that I would rather the game really push the boundaries with visual quality, and force people to upgrade from that aspect of it. However, it seems like the last time that happened was with Crysis, and what year was that? 2007? It used to happen frequently back in the 90s and early 2000s. Even new versions of Windows would make tons of people upgrade, or buy an whole new system.

I also understand what you are saying about people skipping the title all together, but that hasn't happened at all with PUBG. Wikipedia is listing it as having 20 million copies sold already, and it's still in early access. It's well on the way to being one of the top selling PC games of all time, and if Wiki's numbers are accurate (I have no idea), it will be the top selling game of all time, and soon.

My point is just that I'm happy there is something out there pushing for higher end hardware. There are not many things that do these days.

 

[Hendrickson]

I hear you and agree, but there are so few games out there. I have been a BF fan since 1942, but BF1 is a POS with crate purchases, cheating everywhere, and slow promotions. I am really hoping as PubG goes to 1.0 they fix a lot of the issues, but doubt it.

I think Bluehole takes a lot of criticism for some aspects of PUBG, and some deserved, but I don't think they get enough credit for doing some things really well.

Cheating happens in PUBG, but it's really not that common. I've only run into it personally 3 or 4 times since June. That's pretty incredible on a game that has grown as fast as it has. It went from 0 people playing it in March of this year, to setting the record for most concurrent players in a game (any game, ever) in about 3 months.

For what it lacks in optimizations on the client end. It's pretty amazing that they have scaled up to the size they are with very few issues on the backend. Last I saw the number was over 2,000,000 concurrent users on Steam. It's pretty incredible that Bluehole has kept the game from collapsing under it's own success. I doubt even the most optimistic at Bluehole predicted this level of success.

 

[BSim500]

I'm not advocating for poorly optimized games, but it seems like we need a title like this every couple of years, that's basically a must play title, but is going to push people to upgrade their hardware.

^ Only if it actually justifies it on a technical level. "It's popular" isn't a justification for poor hardware optimization. There's no super-AI, no advanced weather effects, it sure as hell doesn't have intelligent realistic physics or fast netcode. On the GPU side, there's a severe mismatch between poor visuals and GPU card required vs Battlefield titles. If it looked flaky but ran fast (CS:GO, Overwatch) people don't mind. If it looked fantastic and ran slow (Crysis) people also don't mind. When they choose UE4 (known for visuals rather than performance), but then the potential is wasted when it ends up looking like a much older game, has vehicle physics worse than pre-2000 titles, and runs slow, that's... really not what most people are going to cheer on, especially compared to much better optimized Frostbyte / idTech titles...

There's a very noticeable trend that every time a new CPU / GPU generation comes out, there's a "justification gap" that sits between having no actual reason in similar existing well optimized games and waiting on future games to catch up, where people who are looking for an excuse to upgrade will start praising recently released poor optimization / bad ports that "require" stronger hardware, but don't actually look / play any better than last year's games that ran twice as fast.

It reminds me of when Crysis 2 came out and also ran like a pig. Most people agreed it could be a lot better optimized, but there were some "ultra-leet 'real gamer' epeen enthusiasts" who just bought themselves top-end rigs who were "delighted" that it ran slow to "show the peasants" that they need to upgrade immediately. Then when it was discovered that the reason for the poor performance was completely wasteful cr*p like massive over-tessellation of invisible water, people started turning the Tess settings down from "Placebo" (Ultra) to sensible non-self-crippling levels, fps went up, and the amount of salt that came from the "We need more cr*ppily optimized games to force peasants to upgrade like me. Wait, they turned Tessellation down instead? That's cheating!" bunch looked something like this...

If people want a new toy for "future proofing" they should just go ahead and buy one. We certainly don't need to cheer on poor optimization as an excuse to upgrade. That's just "guilt buying". Likewise rare PC exclusive aside, "build it and they will come" isn't what sets the new baseline of the bulk of game development, especially for cross-platform games whose 80-90% of sales will continue to come from consoles.

 

[Hendrickson]

I agree It's disappointing that the push forward is coming from poor optimization rather than moving the gaming world forward through stunning visuals or some crazy AI/physics/whatever, but I think you guys are missing the point I was trying to make.

I feel like due to it's immense popularity this game is actually forcing a large number of people to upgrade. My opinion is that this is a good thing for the gaming community and hardware manufacturers as a whole.

 

[moonbogg]

Too bad people are now learning not to upgrade based on a crap optimized game with the new PUBG map release. It runs was better, lol. I almost fell for it myself. "Oh man, I need an 8700K at 5.2ghz to play this game". Its a load of crap. The new map was made better and runs way better.
Same thing happened with Forza Horizon 3. Thought there was no CPU fast enough, then they fixed their stupid game and any CPU runs it great now, lol.

 

[BSim500]

I agree It's disappointing that the push forward is coming from poor optimization rather than moving the gaming world forward through stunning visuals or some crazy AI/physics/whatever, but I think you guys are missing the point I was trying to make. I feel like due to it's immense popularity this game is actually forcing a large number of people to upgrade. My opinion is that this is a good thing for the gaming community and hardware manufacturers as a whole.

I understand your point Hendrickson, and I agree it's good for hardware manufacturers, but game development rarely gets forced by "pushing on a piece of string". The same lazy developers will just continue to churn out poorly optimized ports on newer hardware. Example - Ubisoft's recent bad implementation of combined Denuvo + VMProtect was said to have been wasting 30-40% of CPU cycles on fake "obfuscation" instructions that did literally nothing. Subtract that from the gain coming from say an i5-7600K to i5-8600K upgrade, and we're back to the same worthless "rat race" again of "the more you give them, the more they'll waste". This is the exact opposite of "good for the gaming community" as the question "How much better could the AI be if that CPU usage wasn't wasted on DRM"? is basically an admission of the AAA games industry more holding themselves back with self-destructive behavior than budget gamer "refuseniks" lack of horsepower (many of whom aren't bullied into upgrading anyway for bad ports, they'll just refund and play something else).

What moonbogg said is true. Half the stutter / slowdown in games isn't even a hardware bottleneck that can be brute-forced through. Remember the chronic stutter in Bioshock Infinite & Deus Ex: Human Revolution? Months later both were patched out and i3's + HDD's were suddenly getting smoother fps post-patch than i7's + SSD's were pre-patch. Then DXHR: Directors Cut was released based on earlier pre-patch codebase and all that stutter (and fixed mission breaking bugs) were back in again. It's since been abandoned and even today's top-end rigs can randomly stutter. Likewise, Bioshock 1&2 Remastered has been abandoned in a shocking state filled with new save-game corruption and multiple game-breakers (that weren't even in the originals).

^ This is the ultimate "bottom line result" of encouraging games devs to become even more lazy - "We can't be bothered to optimize for performance and some see that as good as it forces you buy a new computer" goes hand in hand with "...And the same laziness means that we only bothered to do half the usual QA so expect more bugs, we also couldn't be bothered to play-test keyb & mouse, we'll support the game for 3 months post launch not 12, we could have given you Crysis visuals but instead gave you trashy pay2win MT's and loot-boxes, and rather than add extra content we simply ramped up the grind and moved checkpoints further apart to inflate game-length".

And this is why I never see cheering on poor optimization out of misplaced impatience as "a good thing for gaming". The underlying laziness mindset behind it never gets limited to that. In fact for me, it's having the opposite effect of what you describe, I can easily afford a top-end rig, but am sitting here looking at one "hot mess" AAA release after another and thinking "I just don't want to feed this cr*p anymore, and I genuinely fear for the 'future' of PC gaming if this is what 'gamers' have resorted to cheering on..."

 

[Smoblikat]

I was thikning about this recently too, but in regards to Ark and not PUBG. I have had to build/upgrade 3 computers this year alone just to handle Ark at what I would consider to be minimal visual quality with reasonable framerates. I dont think it helps the hardware manufacturers too much though, since I buy all my parts used and never ever buy current top of the line stuff. I recently threw together a rig for my friend with an I7 2600K and an R9 290, plays Ark perfectly fine at a mix of high/epic at 1080P.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Anything that drives the sector is good.

If the game is fun enough that people are willing to play it when it's running like crap and actually go out to buy updated hardware just to accommodate the unoptomized code, every one wins. Even the consumer as they're enjoying themselves.

Same thing is happening with Star Citizen. They kept saying it's going to be next gen... so when 3.0 went to ptu and it had all the high def planetary stuff, and it was using more than 16GB's of ram in some instances, there were 100's if not 1000's of people that went out and upgraded their ram even though they KNEW that the ram usage was from unoptomized code and that Star Citizen's devs kept saying they were aggressively pursuing means to diminish the ram footprint and that the 16GB+ of usage was likely a memory leak.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I personally never saw the super terrible performance PUBG allegedly had. I saw people on forums reporting ridiculously low frame rates with a 7700k and 1080Ti (like in the 20-40 range). I got better than that with my 2600k and a 980Ti and my new 8700k and 1080Ti destroys it and I’m often at the 144 FPS cap.

ARK on the other hand - now THAT was a poorly optimized game. I gave up on it and wanted to return it but Steam wouldn’t let me. It would probably fly on my new rig, but everyone else I know gave up on it too.

 

[JimKiler]

I have yet to play/buy PUBG and am not in a hurry until they optimize the game. I heard that the PUBG guys buy virtual goods to put in the game like houses and such. Is that true? i have started to play Fortnite's Battle Royale and so far love it. It runs smooth and being able to build defensive walls is nice. They even added a 50 versus 50 mode that is interesting.

I cannot wait till more games in this genre come out and replace both PUBG and Fortnite with a better experience as these games will probably not last.

I would love to see random starts isntead of always getting a choice. I would also like to see random map generation.

I will buy PUBG if they can optimize better or it gets cheap enough since i am frugal and rarely spend over $15 on a title. I just finished CoD:AW and not having to worry about patches is nice.

 

[futurefields]

TS is clearly somebody who is willing to spend tons of $$$ on pc hardware, which I believe is atleast 50% of whatever point he is trying to make here.