this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
56 points (91.2% liked)
Games
16443 readers
558 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What where people complaining about?
From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.
Difficulty wise, yeah, it's hard. That's a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it's probably better that they launched a game that is "too hard" and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you'll make things much harder on yourself.
Shader compilation stuttering only happens if a game was coded incorrectly to begin with.
Shaders should never ever be compiled during gameplay, and if it has to be done, done so asynchronously.
Either way it should never be dismissed as a problem that is "common in new games". It's amateurish and completely avoidable.
Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don't studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.
Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.
This isn't about defending Fromsoft, they're just another company trying to get your money. I'm just saying that's how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).
I know.
But only games running dx12/Vulkan must compile shaders.
The "normalcy" of sutters on linux is because dx7-11 games are running through vulkan, and those games were never coded to account for the way Vulkan works. Hence the shaders are compiled (by VKD3D/DXVK, not the game) during gameplay when first needed.
Like I said, if games must compile shaders during gameplay, they should do so asynchronously in order to not impact frametimes. This only applies to titles actually coded with the intention of being run under dx12/vulkan. Elden Ring in particular straight up violates the dx12 spec.
Compiling the shaders in advance also doesn't take 30 minutes, and doesn't require doing so for the entire game. Many games will only compile the shaders for the immediate area that a player is in. (Apex Legends in dx12 mode for example processes only the current map in rotation and lets you play when it's done)
Games that precompile shaders when running using Vulkan/dx12 have never made me wait longer than a few minutes at most, and only at first launch.
There is no excuse.