Nearly every major PC port has run into issues this year. Why? I asked some developers to find out.
This story is part of Jacob Roach's ReSpec series, covering the world of PC gaming and hardware. When looking at the state of PC releases in 2023, it’s easy to start pointing fingers. The game isn’t optimized , or the publisher rushed it out too quickly, or the graphics cards Nvidia has been selling us come with too little VRAM. But these accusations, in most cases, are half-baked and presumptuous, and although they hint at reality, they don’t tell the full story.
As a thought experiment, let’s say a developer pinned down 100 different PC configurations to test, varying the CPU, GPU, RAM, and hard drive between them. For the record, this is a number I’m just pulling out, not something a developer actually referenced as a realistic goal.
This isn’t a new story. The large swath of PC configurations is the common culprit in everything from how difficult it is to optimize games on PC to why we haven’t seen Xbox’s Quick Resume show up in Windows. The question is what developers can do despite the limited time and money they have. Because PCs aren’t getting any simpler, and games are still arriving on the platform broken.
Setting that goal from the start seemed important to Hi-Fi Rush‘s stability. The developers note that it was a design goal from the beginning to maintain at least 60 frames per second due to the fact that it’s both a rhythm game and an action game, where falling short of that mark would cause “hiccups [that] could result in a desync from music and a perceived poor gameplay experience,” according to Johanas.
I asked the team what it learned from Hi-Fi Rush that it could carry into larger, wider projects, but that’s not exactly how Tango is taking lessons from the game. In fact, the development team told me it learned much more about optimization from Ghostwire: Tokyo, which fits into more of the traditional AAA mold, and it carried those ideas into Hi-Fi Rush, not the other way around.
As we’ve seen with other Unreal Engine 4 games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Redfall, the engine isn’t very good about scaling to the many threads available on modern CPUs. As Miyashita explains: “How difficult supporting multi-threading can be is highly dependent on the used engine’s architecture. Unfortunately, UE4 falls a bit short in this respect.”
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