So that leads into a content discipline process. "Naturally, we insist that you make the game look as pretty as it possibly can. Since it's so difficult to raise the visual bar, one developer tells me, conversations about performance targets that should be had at the beginning of a project aren't always conducted and adhered to. If you spend three, four years making that game and it runs at 30, it's pretty much impossible to make the jump to 60 fps at that point. It means higher headcounts on staff, longer project turnaround times, more components in the pipeline. So in simplified terms, developers have to try twice as hard to achieve half the progress that would have been possible 10 years ago. That causes a big problem for digital creators. Since we broke Moore's Law in the 2010s we haven't been able to depend on raw technical heft to produce better game visuals, smarter AI, and other markers of fidelity that shift units and garner heavyweight metascores. You'll have noticed that it's getting exponentially more expensive and more complex to create big games lately, and that the end results are more unpredictable. And in a way, it's all down to the number of transistors in microprocessors. This is a different face of the same problem that's causing poor PC ports-developers have an increasingly tough time hitting the performance targets required for each platform. They preferred to remain nameless, but the message is that this isn't a PC port problem, it's a videogame development problem.Įxhibit A: the growing trend of ‘performance' modes in console releases. However, developers at two unnamed studios I've recently spoken to about modern videogame performance gave me some steers. There just aren't easily identifiable commonalities among them, before we even get to the trickier part: linking commonality and causality. An easy answer to this bizarre plague of bad PC ports is off the table, then.
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