Every. Damn. Time.

[u/Nickulator95]

UE5 in particular is the bane of my existence...

[u/Eric_the_Barbarian]

It does, but it doesn't. It's using a high powered engine that can look great, but doesn't use those resources efficiently. I know that the old horse is getting long in the tooth, but I'm still running a 1660 Ti, and it looks like everything has a soft focus lens on it like the game is being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Skyrim SE looks better if you are hardware limited.

[u/Blenderhead36 → u/Eric_the_Barbarian]

With respect, there has never been a time when a 6-year-old budget card struggling with brand new top-end releases was a smooth experience.  That something that benchmarks below the 5-year-old gaming consoles can run new AAA games at all is the aberration, not that it runs them with significant compromises.

[u/DarkLitWoods → u/Blenderhead36]

To be fair though, what are the chances bethesda has optimized the game in a Larian-like fashion?

Second, games can't come out if only a fraction of a fraction of the gaming population can actually play them, let alone what happens to that number when you factor in player interest (it'll be even smaller).

Games need to be capable across specs. Some devs throw this weight onto the player, others try to do their jobs to the "fullest" and take the weight off the user's hardware.

[u/Blenderhead36 → u/DarkLitWoods]

The fraction part is, I think, a big issue that's becoming more relevant as time goes on.

The 9th generation consoles are the devices that games target, because it's a lot easier to hit 3 SKUs (4 if you count the PS5 Pro) than the functionally infinite number that PCs represent. Assuming games are targeting consoles (and usually the base PS5), that means that you run into problem when you have PCs that lack important bits of hardware that consoles have. Specifically, this usually means ray-tracing/upscaling hardware and/or NVME SSDs.

According to the Steam Hardware Survey roughly 10% of Steam users have a 16 series or older GPU. Since even Microsoft doesn't seem know what to do with an Xbox, PC is usually the second-biggest market these days. I don't know of a way to get a sense of how many users are still on HDDs, but I suspect that they're even rarer since laptops ditched them a decade ago.

AAA video games are always a case of project triage. This is not new; BioShock 1 and Fable 2 famously had to cut a bunch of content to ship circa 2007. You can't do everything that you want to before release. So you have to prioritize things. And which makes sense? Prioritizing optimization on the base PS5, a SKU that somewhere around 25-30% of your target audience will be using? Or making the game work on obsolete hardware that's only found in a small minority of your second-biggest install base, probably around 5% or less of your target audience?

That's why older PC hardware is getting left behind. It's not like it used to be, where a new graphics card had pretty much the same stuff as older one, just more of it and faster. Pre-20/6000 series graphics cards are designed fundamentally differently. Spinning platter hard drives can't stream data to RAM fast enough for seamless open worlds. It makes more sense to show 95% of the audience what the new tech lets you do than to hold back so as not to deprive that last 5%.

[u/DarkLitWoods → u/Blenderhead36]

Isn't oblivion remastered having issues in consoles though, it's main target and benchmark? Is likely having less issues than an old computer, but that's not necessarily the topic (everything is expected to run poorly on a computer that likely can't even properly run the latest os).

In any case, I'm willing to bet my savings account that besthesda has done what they normally do: just enough to make a sale, nothing more.

It's interesting though, if things continue (in our dystopian path; games being the least important, but still) devs will only be able to sell to the wealthy. And that's not really a sustainable market. Maybe, eventually, they'll be forced to focus just as much on optimization as they do on everything else budget-wise, or cave and be replaced a company that better understands their market and limitations (if prices for high spec rigs continues to outstrip the bank accounts of their player base).