Graphics Versus Optimisation

[WhitbyDragon]

Starting from a position of relative ignorance on game design, so bear with if this is backwards.

I have a basic low grade graphics card, it can barely manage most AAA releases turning the settings to the floor. Some titles I expect to destroy my machine run smoothly, some that are relatively low grade graphics die a death. Case in point, Saints Row 2 versus Deus Ex HR. Deus Ex looks and runs well on the bottomed out settings, despite it's "look how pretty this is" focus, and Saints Row 2 could barely run the starting level, again bottomed out on graphics.

What's the deal with this, is it lazy programming on the Saints Row side or something I'm just not thinking of?

On a side note, having moved back to PC gaming, I was getting ripped off sumat rotten for my X box games!!

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Not sure about SR2 specifically, but a /lot/ of multiplats for the past five years or so have been lazily optimized on the PC. The console versions run on the same hardware as they have for close to 10 years, but the average gaming PC has gotten significantly more powerful in that time, so the publishers/devs spend less time optimizing, assuming the customer will have a powerful enough PC to make it unnecessary.

 

[shrekfan246]

Saints Row 2 is an infamously bad port.

I wouldn't really say it's because of lazy programming, though certainly that's the case in certain circumstances, but rather a potential inexperience with programming on certain APIs. Windows and the Xbox 360 are extremely similar because they use DirectX, but they're not exact, and the PS3 is radically different than both of them. There are elements of the code that can carry over between systems, but by and large the developers are working on three completely different versions of the game when they're trying to build it for Windows, the Xbox, and the PS3 all at once. And when it comes to PCs it can get even more complicated, because the Xbox uses DirectX 9 while the PC is up to DirectX 11, and some OSes make better use of OpenGL than DirectX (which is owned by Microsoft, coincidentally).

One thing I'm hoping comes from the greater standardization of consoles, which are going to start using x86 architecture when the new generation Sony/Microsoft consoles release, is the greater optimization of PC versions of games. The past three years or so have been pretty good, especially for big-budget releases if just because PC hardware is so drastically more powerful than the consoles now, but you still get the odd straggler here and there and smaller indie titles generally seem to have a hell of a time of it, though again that might just be more down to inexperience of developing for PCs.

EDIT: In the case of Saints Row 2 in particular, it has an issue whereby the in-game engine freaks out if your processor doesn't run at 3.2 GHz (the speed of the Xbox 360 processor). There's a few mods and tweaks you can mess around with to alter the in-game speed to actually become playable based on your actual processor speed.

It's a pretty unique problem even among widely-acknowledged "bad" ports, so I'm not really sure whether to blame it on laziness or just inexperience, myself.

 

[WhitbyDragon]

Saints Row 2 is an infamously bad port.

I wouldn't really say it's because of lazy programming, though certainly that's the case in certain circumstances, but rather a potential inexperience with programming on certain APIs. Windows and the Xbox 360 are extremely similar because they use DirectX, but they're not exact, and the PS3 is radically different than both of them. There are elements of the code that can carry over between systems, but by and large the developers are working on three completely different versions of the game when they're trying to build it for Windows, the Xbox, and the PS3 all at once. And when it comes to PCs it can get even more complicated, because the Xbox uses DirectX 9 while the PC is up to DirectX 11, and some OSes make better use of OpenGL than DirectX (which is owned by Microsoft, coincidentally).

One thing I'm hoping comes from the greater standardization of consoles, which are going to start using x86 architecture when the new generation Sony/Microsoft consoles release, is the greater optimization of PC versions of games. The past three years or so have been pretty good, especially for big-budget releases if just because PC hardware is so drastically more powerful than the consoles now, but you still get the odd straggler here and there and smaller indie titles generally seem to have a hell of a time of it, though again that might just be more down to inexperience of developing for PCs.

EDIT: In the case of Saints Row 2 in particular, it has an issue whereby the in-game engine freaks out if your processor doesn't run at 3.2 GHz (the speed of the Xbox 360 processor). There's a few mods and tweaks you can mess around with to alter the in-game speed to actually become playable based on your actual processor speed.

It's a pretty unique problem even among widely-acknowledged "bad" ports, so I'm not really sure whether to blame it on laziness or just inexperience, myself.

I only have a 1.6 gig processor, but dual core. I keep finding issues with that, the last game was The Ship, it wouldn't even run it as all it could see was the 1.6, not the fact that it was dual core. It was gifted to me so I feel really bad for that somehow.

I will look for the mods on Saints Row 2, thanks for the info!

Now I just need to work on owning the level of PC the Dev's think I should own... (not going to happen, no pennies!!)

 

[Rack]

For some reason every game that has GTA DNA in it runs poorly on PC. Saints ROw 2 is probably the worse offender but they all suffer from crappy optimisation. I expect there's some weird trick they do to get them running smoothly on consoles that makes it hard to make PC versions play nice. It's also possible since they all run so badly no-one bothers to do any better than anyone else.