Madison Genthry 
PCs are the king of modern gaming hardware power. CPUs like AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D and GPUs like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 far outperform the potential of the fastest consoles, albeit at a much higher price. Given this potential, we’d expect these systems to deliver universally fantastic gaming performance, right? Well, not so much.
In the real world, PC gaming is only as smooth as the optimization process allows. Many developers eschew this responsibility, leaving players with expensive and powerful rigs to suffer the pains of poor performance. It’s an issue that seems to be growing worse, with titles like Dragon’s Dogma 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and Cities Skylines 2 seeing release in unacceptable states. This leaves us wondering, how this keeps happening, where is it avoided, and what hope do we have for the future of gaming optimization?
Complexity and Care
The major contributing component to the poor optimization of modern games comes from the ever-increasing complexity of games and their engines. The more moving parts a game has, the more difficult it is to get those parts working in perfect harmony. Consoles can mitigate this issue by all sharing the same hardware, but PCs don’t have this luxury. A thousand computers can have a thousand different setups and drivers, which unavoidably causes complications and conflict.
Adding to this problem is the rising issue of patch culture within AAA gaming. Many titles are rushed out to market to please stockholders, with the attitude that they can be released in a terrible state and then patched into an acceptable one later. This is extremely anti-consumer, but as players continually support notorious publishers and developers through preorders, the industry has little financial incentive to change tack. That is, unless the response is continuously and overwhelmingly negative, as we saw with the launch of games like Arkham Knight back in 2015.
Settling Positive Examples
The positive examples of well-optimized PC games are usually found on two fronts. The first is the big titles released by companies that place enormous value on their reputations. id Software is a perfect example here, as demonstrated with their 2020 release of Doom Eternal. Doom games have always been famous for pushing technological boundaries, with the first title back in 1993 astounding players with what then humble home computers could do.
Eternal matched this accomplishment more than 25 years later, with the company even managing to release a fantastic port on the fantastically underpowered Nintendo Switch.
More common examples of highly optimized games tend to be found in smaller titles, as are continuously demonstrated in the iGaming landscape. Any of the titles available in a New Jersey online casino like slots, table games, and live releases are developed to play smoothly while looking great even on older and less powerful mobile systems. From claiming bonuses like deposit matches and free spins to browsing and playing, the smaller nature of these titles allows developers to maintain a much firmer grip on optimization. This is just as true in video gaming, where smaller games with fewer moving parts can be just as fun as their larger cousins, but also far more performant.
Hope for the Future
Gaming is increasingly moving away from in-house engines and towards bigger platforms like the Unreal Engine and Unity. While this does introduce some concerns, it also means that developed skills in the gaming industry are more easily transferred than ever before. Instead of having to constantly learn new tools, onboarded workers can instantly jump in, using the optimization techniques they have known for years to improve their work.
Combined with the outcry from upset customers and the hard work of big YouTube channels like Digital Foundry, there is hope that many developers and publishers will embrace a path that better suits consumers in the future. It’s not a guarantee, and there will always be bad actors whenever big money is concerned, but the opportunity to progress is there, we just need to take it.
