Many AAA games like "Doom: The Dark Ages" are starting to require ray tracing. If you listen to YouTube tech channels or Reddit discussions, you would think gamers all have 4K screens and $1000 GPUs, but if we look at the data a different picture of the PC market emerges.
According to the latest Steam hardware survey, nearly a third of active Steam users are playing on ten-year-old GPUs, and even most upgraded systems fall into low to mid-range performance tiers. About 75% of users have GPUs with raw power slightly above, or even lower than, a GE Force 1080 TI released in 2017.
This shows the importance of optimization for a variety of hardware, and raises the question why so many companies are neglecting this aspect of development in modern titles.
downrightmike•11h ago
They ignore it the same reason they ignore the fact that we want single player games first: microtx
The thing that is killing all these live service games is they don't start with single player and expand the endgame with a live service.
That's the only reason that Destiny was a decade long live service. They had trouble at Destiny2's launch because they tried to skip the first person quality game play and the community revolted.
This is why Halo Infinite failed, they were all in with open-world microtx nothings and it ended poorly. A boring sandbox only game is still boring ala Starfield.
garciansmith•9h ago
What is microtx? I see some Oracle product called that but I don't get what it has to do with games.
btschaegg•9h ago
I think that's meant as an abbreviation for "microtransactions".
Josh_Klint•11h ago
According to the latest Steam hardware survey, nearly a third of active Steam users are playing on ten-year-old GPUs, and even most upgraded systems fall into low to mid-range performance tiers. About 75% of users have GPUs with raw power slightly above, or even lower than, a GE Force 1080 TI released in 2017.
This shows the importance of optimization for a variety of hardware, and raises the question why so many companies are neglecting this aspect of development in modern titles.
downrightmike•11h ago
The thing that is killing all these live service games is they don't start with single player and expand the endgame with a live service.
That's the only reason that Destiny was a decade long live service. They had trouble at Destiny2's launch because they tried to skip the first person quality game play and the community revolted.
This is why Halo Infinite failed, they were all in with open-world microtx nothings and it ended poorly. A boring sandbox only game is still boring ala Starfield.
garciansmith•9h ago
btschaegg•9h ago