Any modern PC is a goddang supercomputer, and there’s no excuse for yet-another-RPG running poorly.
Do less per frame. Do things less often. Or just uncouple your main do-stuff thread from the show-stuff thread, so the game renders at 60 Hz, even if everything but your character updates mere dozens of times per second. It’s not a twitch shooter. Giving dudes an animation to play and a vector to run along is perfectly fine for interpolation between what’s-this-guy-doing events.
You can favor anything the player’s looking at. You can favor anything gameplay-critical. Cheating your ass off does not have to mean enemies run against walls or run through walls. But it shouldn’t mean an engine you’ve been using, for years, runs like you heard about optimization on the back of a cereal box. You had time to bodge this sort of nonsense.
“Will it run Crysis?” was a cute joke back when devs had no idea what they were doing… and still gave artists every new effect they could describe. All those gimmicks have since been distilled onto a potato, and then surpassed by physically-based rendering, which also runs on the potato. This game looks like any current PBR pipeline… but slower. Honest warnings would be better, but if you did it right, there’d be nothing to warn about.
The issue is the physics. 60Hz doesn’t give you much time to do everything that needs to be calculated in the interval. All the objects can interact with one another so it’s not easily independent and parallelisable.
There’s still optimisations that can be made - disable physics and have only certain actions enable them for nearby objects, smaller physics range, fewer physics-enabled objects, etc. - but those all have drawbacks for the gameplay and realism too.
What ragdoll avalanche is happening in towns? This RPG isn’t set amid an immersive simulation with Teardown’s physics. It’s some guys walking around a fairly static environment. Even if the cloth animation is jawdropping or dust falls off the awnings as you stomp past, that’s not an O(N^2) situation. Hell, even when every thing can bump every other thing, there’s acceleration structures for that. A falling brick isn’t hitting anything in the next town over. A dropped helmet shouldn’t bounce to the moon.
This problem is not new. There can be reasons. But not excuses.
PBR
Potato Based Rendering?
To anyone who has played it - does it look a lot better than say, Witcher 3 or Elden Ring? Because in the footage and photos I’m not seeing much that explains why it’s so hardware-intensive. If you told me this came out 5 years ago I’d probably believe you based off the graphics in the review I watched.
It’s all about art direction and style. From what I’ve played in DD2, it’s very much the first game but more complex NPCs, which is my own bottleneck. My poor i7-4790k can’t handle staying in Vernworth for more than 5 mins lmao. I do like how much attention the art direction got in the castle, was legit jaw dropping first glance. The graphics definitely isn’t that much of an issue.
I personally still vastly prefer Elden Ring’s wonderfully twisted style, same with anything From puts out. And I can play them on my potato.
By today’s standards, that’s a pretty weak CPU at this point. I upgraded from mine not long after the Gamers Nexus review that pegged it at about the same performance as a 10th gen i3. I was already planning to upgrade at that point, but it really was a kicker.
It looks much better than elden ring in that all the models are much higher quality. Elden Ring was designed around relatively modest assets, and does wonders with what it has, but there is no comparison, DD2 wins hands-down.
As for art direction, that is subjective. Plenty of reasons to prefer looking at ER.
The Witcher 3 is almost a decade old at this point
Some of it probably is Denuvo, which has a serious performance impact. IIRC it encrypts the assets in ram which needs to be unencrypted when needed, causing heavy CPU usage and performance loss.
Can’t say much about how it likely impacts this game in particular, I haven’t played it.
I know some people get some very noticeable stuttering in this game, probably because of denuvo
I don’t think it’s particularly gpu intensive like you’d expect for a graphically intense game, there’s a heavy cpu bottleneck due to Npc calculations, some have suggested due to a lot of physics calculations with npcs. The npcs also have severe pop in issues in the city. For most people playing this the gpu isn’t going to be the issue. Even the most powerful gaming cpus are only able to take it so far in its current state though.
Imo, doesn’t look good enough to warrant the performance. And the devs already said the problem is Cpu not graphics
My GPU is a GeForce RTX 2700S and my CPU is exactly the minimum spec, an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, and I’m able to play at a stable 30FPS with only occasional stutters when loading a new chunk in a big city. In my 50+ hours played, I haven’t once had performance negatively impact my experience.
Edit: With the latest game update, I now get 60FPS while exploring and 40-50FPS in cities.
I believe it would be an “abject” lesson
