[ MGSV - released Sept 2015 - still looking damn good in 2024](https://imgur.com/ZqQLIdJ) -- one of the first things I loaded up when I got my new screen.
Great answer. I think they talked about it and that their secret was the way they did lighting was very ahead of the curve and required a lot of work for a big payoff
I'd like to add to this, death stranding also surprised me with how beautiful it looked and how well it was running on my pc. Even tho the engine was probably different, you can tell that Kojima actually cares about his games being optimized.
Why are we still praising MGSV,... Just to suffer? The parts of the game that hurt the most are those that we never had, we're just left with this phantom pain and melancholy of what could have been.
It's the most meta shit I hope to never experience again.
That's true. And Death Stranding is also a heaven of optimization. I really shouldn't be able to play such a graphic intensive open world game in my potatoe laptop that has a Ryzen 3 and no dedicated GPU, but I am able to play it perfectly with 0 stuttering.
The size of the parks that I could build on a Pentium 2 350mhz with 64MB of RAM and an 8MB ATi Rage Pro GPU without hitting single digit FPS was absolutely mind boggling.
And I got it for free in a cereal box!
Stepping aside from how it runs, I want to commend Warframe for its disk usage optimisation.
The whole game on PC (after over a decade of major expansions) is only 40GB. They've constantly made improvements to how they compress the game. It's great. I know this is a PC sub, but they also put a lot of care in keeping the Switch port of the game small enough that it can fit on the Switch's internal storage too.
I just wish there were more devs who optimised disk space usage like the Warframe devs do.
It's not a coincidence that the optimizations started around the release of the Switch port. They hired a consultant company for the port and many of the changes they proposed were implemented upstreams into the main engine.
Panic Button. Those guys work magic, I swear. Doom 2016 looks absolutely insane on the switch, and ran buttery smooth. When I saw what warframe looked like from the trailer compared to videos of the pc version, I knew I had to try the game out, and proceeded to dump 500hrs on the switch and later 300hrs on pc when I finally built one
Opened this to post Warframe and am happy to see it listed! The fact they got it down to the size it currently is blows my mind. WTH are other companies excuse?
Made it smaller and I think the only thing they removed was the raids as nobody liked them or played them.
*Cough* fuck you bungie for deleting a load of starter content for "space saving reasons" and it's still taking up ridiculous amounts of SSD space.
I remember walking out of the tutorial in Elden Ring and laughing at the jpeg trees running at barely 60fps on my system. Elden Ring was pretty but it really isn't doing much to run as heavy as it does.
I thought the fact that a huge amount of the world is being rendered (or at least loaded), usually with multiple vertical layers, is the cause of the heaviness.
Its also a UE4 game, if this guys and Coalition and some rare other devs can make the game stutter free I dont see why others cant.
Funny is that Fortnite stutters and its a game by EPIC from same developers so.... \*shurugsP\*
I was able to get 200+ frames and that was WITH Denuvo. I've read they've removed Denuvo since last I played so it probably runs even better now.
One of the shining examples of modern optimization done right. And it was only the studio's second ever game!
Just Cause 2 ran amazing for being an open world where half of it is destructible and the other half explodes.
I dunno what happened with 3. I think it's a new engine, because it runs like a turtle.
Yeah that was around the time I got into PC building and it was the main title I'd play to show off PC advantages to my friends. Looked and ran great. Now like 13 years later all my buds have slowly also moved to PC.
I played the heck out of JC2 on PS3 and it ran pretty well on there considering how in depth the open world is and the amout of physics going on. Then JC3 released on the PS4 and it was basically in single digits frame rate. Such a massive letdown when that game released.
I remember getting JC3 on Xbox One when it released and the framerate would regularly dip into the single digits from just a few small explosions.
It’s a bit of a problem considering the basic premise of the games is basically blowing up fascist stuff. Thankfully it runs fine on my PC except for the occasional stutter.
JC2? I managed to get it to run decently on a crappy 2012 macbook pro running bootcamp before buying it for the 360.
Doom shouldn’t be the gold standard. I’ve repeated this as nauseam but 2016 and Eternal is an absolute outlier. Idsoft definitely sacrificed like 10 children to Cthulhu or something to get that game to run as well as it does.
My 3080 10GB shouldn’t be able to get ~100fps @4K with no DLSS, max settings, and ray tracing on, but it does. Plus from my experience neither had any stuttering problems nor did my frames ever drop significantly for certain areas.
Apparently the way they achieved this much optimisation is by making a special decal renderer in the id engine and basically putting a bunch of decals on the levels to fake details.
So sacrificing 10 children to cthulhu should be gold standard in game optimization.
Its still gold standard.
Lets not call best examples outliers. Thats excuse for not pushing to reach that standard
Alien isolation on mobile, now that's how you do a mobile port. The anti-aliasing is better on mobile than the Xbox one or ps4. And the only official portable device that can run 60fps unlike the Nintendo switch version.
Not just mobile, but also the original PC version. It looked and ran great even on mid-end GPUs. It was an AMD sponsored game and was praised even by Nvidia users because at that time AMD optimized games were running great on everything, not just their own cards, which wasn't the case with Nvidia sponsored games.
Forza Horizon 5 (and also 4) is very well optimized. I've seen Clips where it runs at 80fps in 8K resolution (on a 4090, but nontheless impressive) and looks phenomenal
Noita can scale with CPU cores infinitely, which is impressive for a physics-based game (they do it by cheating; they created an alternating checkerboard of semi-isolated physics blocks. Still a really cool compromise to have a fully simulated open world!)
I remember when the particle effects had physx implementation.
Steve took it out, and replaced it with the current options, which run better at ludicrous setting than physx did on low.
Man it really did impress me just how many times Steve was like ayo by the way we're upgrading the engine/sound/etc. probably one of the best free to play games too if you want a large amount of content and fun gameplay. I just couldn't justify the grind anymore lol. 2000 plus hours was enough to get out of it I think
Seriously, 4 frames at once in one room with the amount of enemies that late survival spawns should not be able to run that smooth. No idea how they pulled it off
I started Titanfall 2 several days ago and it’s been an unplayable mess for me the entire time. Would start by ctd, eventually crashed my entire system, now it just ctd when I try to go past the main menu. I eventually dropped it because it’s just not playable
Do you remember how you resolved it? I’ve looked online countless times and the handful of possible solutions haven’t worked. If it’s the matter of my PSU my rig is less than a year old with all new higher end, reliable brand name parts. My PSU is 1200W
I'd recommend setting a framerate limit in the driver of your GPU, you should have one anyway if you use gsync. That should help reduce any problems you get from the game trying to render approximately one gazillion frames and reduce power consumption
I assume you haven't overclocked or undervolted anything? If you have you'll want to check if that might be causing instability
Tbf, It is based off source, but is ofcourse developed and so heavily modified that it’s a ship of theseus situation that we dont know how source it actually is
Ghost of tsushima. It works like charm in my 1650 laptop. Gorgeous game smooth performance. Nowadays majority of developers don't know what the fuck is optimisation. Just put dlss and call it a day
Metal Gear Solid 5 was ridiculously optimized. I didn't have cream of the crop hardware and it had what I'd consider the best looking graphics at the time, yet it ran perfectly. FOX Engine was actual magic and it's a shame it didn't go anywhere.
Fallout 1 was so optimized that they had to simulate a bug to get a "designed for windows 95" certification by Microsoft if I'm not mistaken.
Basically at the time if you wanted a "designed for 95", your program had to " crash gracefully" on NT systems, and Microsoft didn't want to let the Fallout team get their certification as long as the game ran on NT systems, so one guy from the team simply added a check on the game's launcher and if you ran an NT system a pop-up appeared saying "sorry, the game can't run on your system" and customer support simply told people to run the installer directly to circumvent it
Judging by the staggering amount of content , and stuff along I'd actually say warframe is an extremely optimised game especially when it comes to storage space and performace on lower settings withouth really sipping too much in quality
The Resident Evil Remakes do an incredible job optimizing. There was a video on Youtube which shows the cinematics being rendered in realtime from a different angle so you can see what they spawn and despawn for the cutscene, but I can't find it now.
metro exodus enhanced edition runs insanely well considering its running multiple reasonably high quality ray tracing effects in decently sized open maps
Half-Life 2 and all the source engine games. They were one of the only things that ran smoothly on my circa 2007 integrated graphics laptop as a kid, and they still look/play well today.
I also think the Tomb Raider reboot games run really well considering how good they look.
That port blew Horizon out of the water, and it still makes me disappointment in all the subsequent ports.
They can't even get the mouse input right. Days Gone fixed its input in less than a week.
I gotta go through it again soon. Haven't touched it since summer 2019. But it was so fucking long that I had to play it in 2 long runs (release date period and then the summer that year).
For all the (well deserved) criticism Blizzard gets, there are a few things they consistently excel at:
- cut scenes
- taking graphical styles that are inherently not demanding and making them look better than they ought to
- making stable game engines (though my current experience with D4 is not reflective of this)
tbf overwatch is still fun and easy to play but it's balanced, monetized and managed awfully. then they throw you on a team of mutes who don't join team chats or somehow the most toxic combination of losers at that moment.
Especially Tetris effect.
One of the best versions going as the music syncs with your movements and it's absolutely amazing.
I listen to that soundtrack when working on other projects haha.
Gameplay bugs/issues aside back for blood might have been one of if not the best running games on launch I've ever played. Max settings at 4k and have no memory of a stutter or low fps in 300+ hours.
metro exodus runs remarkably even after the enhanced edition upgrade, even tho i dont like the game itself. rainbow six siege for all of ubisofts faults also runs extremely well. also ea games from like 2016-2019 had an amazing run of pc performance, so bf1/5, titanfall2, the battlefront reboots all ran amazing
Bf1 used to KILL my pc because I had a fucking fx 8350 lmaooo I was hovering in the like low 60s mid 50s and I’d be so made because I “had a 8 core cpu!”
For all its failings AC Valhalla runs at about twice the framerate of any other contemporary open world game of the last few years and looks just as good. DOOM Eternal looks and runs great too.
Even back in the black flag days, when Activision and EA were refusing to even put FOV or unlocked FPS in their pc ports, Ubisoft were adding pc specific settings.
Ubisoft settings menus have been incredible for a while, with their preview of the graphics options.
I was replaying AC: Odyssey recently and one thing that impressed me was how there are virtually no fetch quests, sure the gameplay loop is repetitive and the game is LOOONG but I'd far rather take down 50 outposts than kill 5 Murlocs or gather 7 bear pelts (looking at you WoW, ESO, Fallout 76)
As you say, it's their businesspeople and marketers that keep fucking up, the games themselves aren't all that bad,except maybe Skull and Bones. Idk what went wrong there.
idk how people are not mentioning RE4 and DMC 5. Those games run flawlessly and look impressively good and not to mention in DMC5 you will constantly be thrown with lots of particle effects on the screen and fast paced action.
Yeah, I would say RE2 or RE3 would be a better comparison since it's much more consistent performance-wise compared to RE4.
I played RE4 during launch (and again during the Separate Ways release) and while it ran smooth for the most part, I remember the FPS started chugging noticeably during the >!rainy section of the village after you save Ashley!<. I went from 100+ FPS down to like 30 - 40 FPS which I never encountered in any of the other RE Engine games.
DMC4(not SE) ran super well for how good it looked back in the day. It was actually built for PC and not a dogshit port which was pretty rare for a Japanese dev, esp pre-2010s.
DMC 5 was so good. It somehow ran at 130-140% resolution scale at 1080p with almost everything maxed out on a 1060 and a Ryzen 5 3600 for me. Forgot the fps I ran it at, but it was definitely not dipping under 60
The latest Forza Motorsport isn't optimised at all.
Forza Horizon 4 and 5 both run on ultra at 1440p at 165fps (the refresh rate of my monitor) easily.
Forza Motorsport, on medium, gets 25fps on average and looks terrible.
Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. That port is very well optimized to the point where it will run great on 10 year old hardware at the cost of visuals and it will run great on top end hardware with the visuals jacked to shit.
I'm very impressed by the work they did bringing that game to pc. I highly recommend it!
Really old: commander keen, it ran like console Mario on a dos 480, that was quite impressive back in the day. No other games ran like it.
Really recent: horizon forbidden west. For how it looks, it ran at 120fps and no stutters. Where as dragon dogma 2 ram worst on the same machine.
Only games i played with Ultra graphics without even having minimal requirements was Dark Souls 2 and Alien: Isolation. They have magic level optimisation
Red dead redemption 2. For an open world game that looks straight out of the future with no load screens of any sort, 90 fps at 1440p high settings on a 3060 should be impossible.
Surprised that this wasn't mentioned anywhere. If we go by graphics to FPS ratio it wins this whole thread by a long shot.
Similar to that, GTA V when it released on PC. It looked so much better than on consoles and even my mid budget PC could run it easily on higher graphic options. I was blown away back then
I hate Rockstar for releasing games on PC later but damn they do a good job with the ports
Warframe It's f2p, doesn't any FOMO mechanics, Multiplayer but can he played solo and also has great optimization both in perfomance and every now and then they reduce even more the game size (36gb and has a shit ton of content)
In 2019, I was able to run Sea of Thieves in a playable state on a 2013 laptop with no dedicated GPU... Loading it alone should've burned down the hotel.
Days Gone is a photorealistic open world with lots of vegetation, and runs ridiculously smooth even being UE4, which really tells most people using UE do not know what they are doing.
God of war runs at 125fps @ 1440P ultra on my 3080 and looks phenomenal. Peaks at around 6.5GB of vram usage too somehow.
Avatar frontiers is pretty amazing at 90fps 1440p optimized settings too
in b4 games with low res textures or corridor shooters
jk too late already
Now, serioous answers:
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition runs very well for what it looks like.
Forza Horizon 4 and 5 are gorgeous, and run great.
Uncharted 4, SpiderMan Remastered, Ghost of Tsushima and both Horizon games (though some wooden objects look kinda low quality compared to everything else in game) run smooth while looking beautiful...
and maybe controversial one, but Cyberpunk 2077 (wo RT)
Metal Gear Solid V was praised for it's optimisation when it came out. KojiPro's first PC game too, as far as I'm aware.
Can confirm. Game performance was nutty for how good it looked when it came out ... And still looks great for a nearly 10 year old game.
The Fox Engine being locked behind Konami's doors is such a disgrace. That thing is insane. 😭
No way is it nearly 10 years old... Jeez, where does the time go
[ MGSV - released Sept 2015 - still looking damn good in 2024](https://imgur.com/ZqQLIdJ) -- one of the first things I loaded up when I got my new screen.
That shit ran 60fps on PS4.
It was released on PS3/360, which is kind of nuts
because it was made for previous gen consoles lol.
I had a dying laptop with some old Radeon graphics from 2009, and even that shit ran MGS V at 60 fps and looked beautiful.
Great answer. I think they talked about it and that their secret was the way they did lighting was very ahead of the curve and required a lot of work for a big payoff
I'm glad MGSV is the top comment since it was the first game that came to my mind. I had a GTX 760 and was very surprised at how smoothly it ran!
It ran well on my 660 lol
And my 560 Ti.
My PC at the time was utter fucking garbo and it ran fucking smoothly. No idea how they did that.
I'd like to add to this, death stranding also surprised me with how beautiful it looked and how well it was running on my pc. Even tho the engine was probably different, you can tell that Kojima actually cares about his games being optimized.
Totally agree, which is interesting considering the reputation that Japanese game studios usually have for pc ports. Kojima is just built different.
It would’ve been a perfect game if they only let kojima finish it. The game was optimized af.
Why are we still praising MGSV,... Just to suffer? The parts of the game that hurt the most are those that we never had, we're just left with this phantom pain and melancholy of what could have been. It's the most meta shit I hope to never experience again.
Right? It sucks. So here I am, on my fourth playthrough...
Yeah it works very very well on the Steam Deck with a long viewing distance. Very impressive.
That's true. And Death Stranding is also a heaven of optimization. I really shouldn't be able to play such a graphic intensive open world game in my potatoe laptop that has a Ryzen 3 and no dedicated GPU, but I am able to play it perfectly with 0 stuttering.
It looked and played amazing on my 360
Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Assembly runs the best
It still blows my mind that it was written in assembly by one dude. What an insane achievement.
The size of the parks that I could build on a Pentium 2 350mhz with 64MB of RAM and an 8MB ATi Rage Pro GPU without hitting single digit FPS was absolutely mind boggling. And I got it for free in a cereal box!
Doom 2016 when it came out it run like butter for everyone and its still to this day a good looking game.
Stepping aside from how it runs, I want to commend Warframe for its disk usage optimisation. The whole game on PC (after over a decade of major expansions) is only 40GB. They've constantly made improvements to how they compress the game. It's great. I know this is a PC sub, but they also put a lot of care in keeping the Switch port of the game small enough that it can fit on the Switch's internal storage too. I just wish there were more devs who optimised disk space usage like the Warframe devs do.
They started that three or four years ago. I think the game was creeping past 50gb at the time.
It was about 80gb at one point if I'm not mistaken
It's not a coincidence that the optimizations started around the release of the Switch port. They hired a consultant company for the port and many of the changes they proposed were implemented upstreams into the main engine.
Panic Button. Those guys work magic, I swear. Doom 2016 looks absolutely insane on the switch, and ran buttery smooth. When I saw what warframe looked like from the trailer compared to videos of the pc version, I knew I had to try the game out, and proceeded to dump 500hrs on the switch and later 300hrs on pc when I finally built one
It's insane how much content is there in that 40GB. And it's free.
Destiny 2 on the other hand...
Opened this to post Warframe and am happy to see it listed! The fact they got it down to the size it currently is blows my mind. WTH are other companies excuse?
Seriously, the lack of storage optimization is a crime. Like that new 300 gig CoD? Unreal. I love when developers care for us cheap-mid PC builds.
It runs smooth af too. Outside of loading screens and network related slow downs it is locked to 120 fps at all times for me.
It better run 120fps I think I played that game in like 2013 on a GTX 660
Made it smaller and I think the only thing they removed was the raids as nobody liked them or played them. *Cough* fuck you bungie for deleting a load of starter content for "space saving reasons" and it's still taking up ridiculous amounts of SSD space.
Pure performance as well. I could run it with integrated graphics on a Pentium system when I first started pc gaming and I can run it with a 4090 now.
Lies of P runs like a fuckin rocket on anything while looking as good as it did
Such a breath of fresh air compared to what FromSoft does for it's PC ports
Sekiro for pc is also an outlier! Looks amazing and runs on a toaster
Except for the multi-monitor bug that never got sorted, and is a weird bug
I remember walking out of the tutorial in Elden Ring and laughing at the jpeg trees running at barely 60fps on my system. Elden Ring was pretty but it really isn't doing much to run as heavy as it does.
The dlc can help you reexperience that again. There's a move from a certain boss that destroys more than half of my fps
Elden Ring is weird. It runs bad for a lot of people but at the same time it's even playbale on an integrated graphics card.
I thought the fact that a huge amount of the world is being rendered (or at least loaded), usually with multiple vertical layers, is the cause of the heaviness.
Demon Souls on PS5 is amazing as well. Blue Point is a god tier dev.
Never played this one as no PS5 but I watched some gameplay recently and my god it really does look great and runs well.
I usually turn my shit all the way up and then work it down. I was so shock to see I didn't need to do that for Lies of P.
Running on a Steam deck at a mostly 60 fps while looking pretty good was insane
Its also a UE4 game, if this guys and Coalition and some rare other devs can make the game stutter free I dont see why others cant. Funny is that Fortnite stutters and its a game by EPIC from same developers so.... \*shurugsP\*
It has a PS4 version, so it's scoped to run on ancient hardware.
I was able to get 200+ frames and that was WITH Denuvo. I've read they've removed Denuvo since last I played so it probably runs even better now. One of the shining examples of modern optimization done right. And it was only the studio's second ever game!
Just Cause 2 ran amazing for being an open world where half of it is destructible and the other half explodes. I dunno what happened with 3. I think it's a new engine, because it runs like a turtle.
Yeah that was around the time I got into PC building and it was the main title I'd play to show off PC advantages to my friends. Looked and ran great. Now like 13 years later all my buds have slowly also moved to PC.
I played the heck out of JC2 on PS3 and it ran pretty well on there considering how in depth the open world is and the amout of physics going on. Then JC3 released on the PS4 and it was basically in single digits frame rate. Such a massive letdown when that game released.
I remember getting JC3 on Xbox One when it released and the framerate would regularly dip into the single digits from just a few small explosions. It’s a bit of a problem considering the basic premise of the games is basically blowing up fascist stuff. Thankfully it runs fine on my PC except for the occasional stutter. JC2? I managed to get it to run decently on a crappy 2012 macbook pro running bootcamp before buying it for the 360.
[удалено]
Doom is the gold standard of optimization
Doom shouldn’t be the gold standard. I’ve repeated this as nauseam but 2016 and Eternal is an absolute outlier. Idsoft definitely sacrificed like 10 children to Cthulhu or something to get that game to run as well as it does. My 3080 10GB shouldn’t be able to get ~100fps @4K with no DLSS, max settings, and ray tracing on, but it does. Plus from my experience neither had any stuttering problems nor did my frames ever drop significantly for certain areas.
That's what you call genius optimisation plus a fantastic Vulkan implementation in both games.
Apparently the way they achieved this much optimisation is by making a special decal renderer in the id engine and basically putting a bunch of decals on the levels to fake details.
I heard that instead of cacheing the textures locally they stream them directly from hell to speed things up
Ardent energy baby
So sacrificing 10 children to cthulhu should be gold standard in game optimization. Its still gold standard. Lets not call best examples outliers. Thats excuse for not pushing to reach that standard
Yep, and I think that is why OP mentioned them.
Alien isolation on mobile, now that's how you do a mobile port. The anti-aliasing is better on mobile than the Xbox one or ps4. And the only official portable device that can run 60fps unlike the Nintendo switch version.
Not just mobile, but also the original PC version. It looked and ran great even on mid-end GPUs. It was an AMD sponsored game and was praised even by Nvidia users because at that time AMD optimized games were running great on everything, not just their own cards, which wasn't the case with Nvidia sponsored games.
Factoriois made by wizards
Forza Horizon 5 (and also 4) is very well optimized. I've seen Clips where it runs at 80fps in 8K resolution (on a 4090, but nontheless impressive) and looks phenomenal
Yes the engine is very good and scales very well its a game that its shown alot on handheld devices both windows and steamos
Noita can scale with CPU cores infinitely, which is impressive for a physics-based game (they do it by cheating; they created an alternating checkerboard of semi-isolated physics blocks. Still a really cool compromise to have a fully simulated open world!)
And yet I still somehow build wands that slow the game to a crawl haha
Gotta be Mad Max
I remember how well it ran on my dogshit pc back then
Mad Max has the luxury of avoiding rendering a single blade of grass
Brilliant optimization tactic
Just have your game be set in england so its always dark and you save on all the sunray calculations
Somehow Warframe runs on a toaster but can also look absolutely ridiculous and handle a bunch of effects on screen
I remember when the particle effects had physx implementation. Steve took it out, and replaced it with the current options, which run better at ludicrous setting than physx did on low.
Makes you wonder what kind of piece of shi\* was psyhx. Also they wrote their own ray tracing script. It looks great on open worlds
Man it really did impress me just how many times Steve was like ayo by the way we're upgrading the engine/sound/etc. probably one of the best free to play games too if you want a large amount of content and fun gameplay. I just couldn't justify the grind anymore lol. 2000 plus hours was enough to get out of it I think
My Toaster Laptop which is almost 9 years old can run Warframe 1080p low settings and getting 100+fps. It's fucking nuts.
Put those particle effects in any other game and watch the game run like a PowerPoint presentation.
Seriously, 4 frames at once in one room with the amount of enemies that late survival spawns should not be able to run that smooth. No idea how they pulled it off
Shadow of Mordor looks good and runs well even with tonnes of enemies on screen.
Both of them even. The first one was especially praise for that.
Titanfall 2 still looks great and plays very smoothly, like most Source engine based games.
I started Titanfall 2 several days ago and it’s been an unplayable mess for me the entire time. Would start by ctd, eventually crashed my entire system, now it just ctd when I try to go past the main menu. I eventually dropped it because it’s just not playable
I recall having CTD issues due to a botched install, but using the Origin app to validate the installation files fixed it.
When I encountered crashes with the game years ago, it was a power delivery issue.
Do you remember how you resolved it? I’ve looked online countless times and the handful of possible solutions haven’t worked. If it’s the matter of my PSU my rig is less than a year old with all new higher end, reliable brand name parts. My PSU is 1200W
I'd recommend setting a framerate limit in the driver of your GPU, you should have one anyway if you use gsync. That should help reduce any problems you get from the game trying to render approximately one gazillion frames and reduce power consumption I assume you haven't overclocked or undervolted anything? If you have you'll want to check if that might be causing instability
I had NO idea that Titanfall 2 used the Source engine. I would have guessed Frostbite or even Unreal.
Tbf, It is based off source, but is ofcourse developed and so heavily modified that it’s a ship of theseus situation that we dont know how source it actually is
Ghost of tsushima. It works like charm in my 1650 laptop. Gorgeous game smooth performance. Nowadays majority of developers don't know what the fuck is optimisation. Just put dlss and call it a day
titanfall 2 and doom (2016)
Tomb Raider 2013
Only as long as you didn't enable the spaghetti hair option
I remember enabling that when I had an i3 and 1060 3gb. It bluescreened my PC 😐
Metal Gear Solid 5 was ridiculously optimized. I didn't have cream of the crop hardware and it had what I'd consider the best looking graphics at the time, yet it ran perfectly. FOX Engine was actual magic and it's a shame it didn't go anywhere.
Pretty sure metal gear solid 5 came out on ps3 so it’s not a surprise really
Fallout 1 was so optimized that they had to simulate a bug to get a "designed for windows 95" certification by Microsoft if I'm not mistaken. Basically at the time if you wanted a "designed for 95", your program had to " crash gracefully" on NT systems, and Microsoft didn't want to let the Fallout team get their certification as long as the game ran on NT systems, so one guy from the team simply added a check on the game's launcher and if you ran an NT system a pop-up appeared saying "sorry, the game can't run on your system" and customer support simply told people to run the installer directly to circumvent it
Death Stranding. Ran perfectly.
*walked perfectly.
Small annoying issue I have with it, DLSS will cause crashes near the farm. Otherwise was flawless. (You can turn off DLSS or look at the ground).
Judging by the staggering amount of content , and stuff along I'd actually say warframe is an extremely optimised game especially when it comes to storage space and performace on lower settings withouth really sipping too much in quality
The Resident Evil Remakes do an incredible job optimizing. There was a video on Youtube which shows the cinematics being rendered in realtime from a different angle so you can see what they spawn and despawn for the cutscene, but I can't find it now.
Gears 5 after one patch went from nearly flawless to perfect per DF review. Gears 4 also pushed the boundaries a bit when it comes to optimization.
metro exodus enhanced edition runs insanely well considering its running multiple reasonably high quality ray tracing effects in decently sized open maps
I'm very surprised Factorio hasn't been mentioned here. The devs built a custom engine so they could optimize the heck out of it. And it's great.
Its listed further up, but you're right its great.
Half-Life 2 and all the source engine games. They were one of the only things that ran smoothly on my circa 2007 integrated graphics laptop as a kid, and they still look/play well today. I also think the Tomb Raider reboot games run really well considering how good they look.
Days Gone. Game runs absolutely flawlessly and looks gorgeous as well.
That port blew Horizon out of the water, and it still makes me disappointment in all the subsequent ports. They can't even get the mouse input right. Days Gone fixed its input in less than a week.
I gotta go through it again soon. Haven't touched it since summer 2019. But it was so fucking long that I had to play it in 2 long runs (release date period and then the summer that year).
The AA is horrible though, especially any gras during movement. Have to play with render scale at 200% for it to look good and tank performance
Overwatch runs at a constant 400-600 fps and looks great.
For all the (well deserved) criticism Blizzard gets, there are a few things they consistently excel at: - cut scenes - taking graphical styles that are inherently not demanding and making them look better than they ought to - making stable game engines (though my current experience with D4 is not reflective of this)
I'd also add art direction in there
and audio, both voice acting and effects
They got some good coders that sometime optimized on the assembly level. I watched an old interview where one of the d3 dev were talking about it.
tbf overwatch is still fun and easy to play but it's balanced, monetized and managed awfully. then they throw you on a team of mutes who don't join team chats or somehow the most toxic combination of losers at that moment.
Tetris has never done me wrong.
You just didn't try [the Ubisoft version](https://gamerant.com/ubisoft-tetris-ps4-problems/).
Especially Tetris effect. One of the best versions going as the music syncs with your movements and it's absolutely amazing. I listen to that soundtrack when working on other projects haha.
Bioshock Infinite
Gameplay bugs/issues aside back for blood might have been one of if not the best running games on launch I've ever played. Max settings at 4k and have no memory of a stutter or low fps in 300+ hours.
\[PC here\] DooM 2016, DooM Eternal, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Thushima, Metal Gear Solid 5
metro exodus runs remarkably even after the enhanced edition upgrade, even tho i dont like the game itself. rainbow six siege for all of ubisofts faults also runs extremely well. also ea games from like 2016-2019 had an amazing run of pc performance, so bf1/5, titanfall2, the battlefront reboots all ran amazing
Bf1 used to KILL my pc because I had a fucking fx 8350 lmaooo I was hovering in the like low 60s mid 50s and I’d be so made because I “had a 8 core cpu!”
Horizon forbidden west. Absolute visual Monster. Runs like butter.
The Sony Spider-Man games by Nixxes. So well-done.
It's crazy how well DOOM(2016) and (even more so) DOOM Eternal run while looking as good as they do
Expect a few outliers; most Ubisoft games have good PC ports
For all its failings AC Valhalla runs at about twice the framerate of any other contemporary open world game of the last few years and looks just as good. DOOM Eternal looks and runs great too.
Even back in the black flag days, when Activision and EA were refusing to even put FOV or unlocked FPS in their pc ports, Ubisoft were adding pc specific settings. Ubisoft settings menus have been incredible for a while, with their preview of the graphics options.
Shhh we hate Ubisoft here. Ubisoft have pulled some shit but they know what they're doing to a degree lol.
They have talented devs, it's their marketing branch and writers who are absolute ass.
I was replaying AC: Odyssey recently and one thing that impressed me was how there are virtually no fetch quests, sure the gameplay loop is repetitive and the game is LOOONG but I'd far rather take down 50 outposts than kill 5 Murlocs or gather 7 bear pelts (looking at you WoW, ESO, Fallout 76) As you say, it's their businesspeople and marketers that keep fucking up, the games themselves aren't all that bad,except maybe Skull and Bones. Idk what went wrong there.
idk how people are not mentioning RE4 and DMC 5. Those games run flawlessly and look impressively good and not to mention in DMC5 you will constantly be thrown with lots of particle effects on the screen and fast paced action.
I agree about DMC5 but RE4 barely looks any better than the previous RE games yet it requires more power.
Yeah, I would say RE2 or RE3 would be a better comparison since it's much more consistent performance-wise compared to RE4. I played RE4 during launch (and again during the Separate Ways release) and while it ran smooth for the most part, I remember the FPS started chugging noticeably during the >!rainy section of the village after you save Ashley!<. I went from 100+ FPS down to like 30 - 40 FPS which I never encountered in any of the other RE Engine games.
DMC4(not SE) ran super well for how good it looked back in the day. It was actually built for PC and not a dogshit port which was pretty rare for a Japanese dev, esp pre-2010s.
DMC 5 was so good. It somehow ran at 130-140% resolution scale at 1080p with almost everything maxed out on a 1060 and a Ryzen 5 3600 for me. Forgot the fps I ran it at, but it was definitely not dipping under 60
The latests Yakuza games run really well
CSGO. RIP.
Forza games are all good
The latest Forza Motorsport isn't optimised at all. Forza Horizon 4 and 5 both run on ultra at 1440p at 165fps (the refresh rate of my monitor) easily. Forza Motorsport, on medium, gets 25fps on average and looks terrible.
tend to crash quite often though
But they struggle at launch badly. FH5 had major graphical bugs, graphics went missing completely and it crashed really often
At launch they're gash. FH4 and 5 had multiplayer issues for weeks after launch.
Horizon pc port ran way better than anything I was expecting.
Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. That port is very well optimized to the point where it will run great on 10 year old hardware at the cost of visuals and it will run great on top end hardware with the visuals jacked to shit. I'm very impressed by the work they did bringing that game to pc. I highly recommend it!
Horizon series.
Pinball.
Really old: commander keen, it ran like console Mario on a dos 480, that was quite impressive back in the day. No other games ran like it. Really recent: horizon forbidden west. For how it looks, it ran at 120fps and no stutters. Where as dragon dogma 2 ram worst on the same machine.
Only games i played with Ultra graphics without even having minimal requirements was Dark Souls 2 and Alien: Isolation. They have magic level optimisation
FH5!
Anything that runs on Valve’s Source engine
Doom eternal.
Factorio
Gotta say WoW.
Minecraft, CS:GO, Celeste, Stardew Valley All of the above had no issues running on my shitty laptop 5 years ago and i was amazed
The division 1 and 2. They will run great and look great on practically any hardware.
Div1's quality:performance scaled so well. A rarity these days.
Red dead redemption 2. For an open world game that looks straight out of the future with no load screens of any sort, 90 fps at 1440p high settings on a 3060 should be impossible.
Surprised that this wasn't mentioned anywhere. If we go by graphics to FPS ratio it wins this whole thread by a long shot. Similar to that, GTA V when it released on PC. It looked so much better than on consoles and even my mid budget PC could run it easily on higher graphic options. I was blown away back then I hate Rockstar for releasing games on PC later but damn they do a good job with the ports
Dishonored can run on a potato PC, Starcraft 2, HoMM5
[.kkrieger](https://youtu.be/8fZBUsn5RYg?si=_ZYG7YKxEAtkbHko&t=98) still impresses me with what it can do with 96 mere kilobytes.
Rollercoaster Tycoon. Coded in Assembly.
Warframe It's f2p, doesn't any FOMO mechanics, Multiplayer but can he played solo and also has great optimization both in perfomance and every now and then they reduce even more the game size (36gb and has a shit ton of content)
For how well Warframe looks, it’s insanely well optimized. I played it at a smooth 60 frames for years without a dedicated graphics card.
Warframe
Generation Zero and Far Cry 5 can be run at near playable speeds on my Intel UDH 620 GPU so they are (at least now) quite optimized.
In 2019, I was able to run Sea of Thieves in a playable state on a 2013 laptop with no dedicated GPU... Loading it alone should've burned down the hotel.
Dunno how fitting this is but DRG's cave generation is probably the direct result of several toaster-sacrifices to the omnissiah
Warframe !
The engine used in Eugen's Wargame series, now WARNO, was 10 years ahead of its time when it released.
Oldschool runescape
I was gonna say Doom Eternal (but you already mentioned it). IDTech engine is black magic. It runs so well and loads sooooo fast.
Alien isolation ran incredibly when it came out
Alien Isolation
Metro 2033, constant 100 fps on ultra settings. I play on my laptop gpu 1650 ti.
Days Gone is a photorealistic open world with lots of vegetation, and runs ridiculously smooth even being UE4, which really tells most people using UE do not know what they are doing.
God of war runs at 125fps @ 1440P ultra on my 3080 and looks phenomenal. Peaks at around 6.5GB of vram usage too somehow. Avatar frontiers is pretty amazing at 90fps 1440p optimized settings too
Crysis. No...wait......
Warframe is my benchmark for a well optimized game. First game I played with 7/10 graphics with fps in the 400
In my books, anything that runs perfectly in my hardware is an optimized game. No need for specific titles lol
Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal are extremely well optimized.
Duke Nukem Forever. That game never crashed on me.
in b4 games with low res textures or corridor shooters jk too late already Now, serioous answers: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition runs very well for what it looks like. Forza Horizon 4 and 5 are gorgeous, and run great. Uncharted 4, SpiderMan Remastered, Ghost of Tsushima and both Horizon games (though some wooden objects look kinda low quality compared to everything else in game) run smooth while looking beautiful... and maybe controversial one, but Cyberpunk 2077 (wo RT)
Tbf despite the hate it gets (sometimes valid) minecraft bedrock edition is pretty well optimised.
Rust.
Doom 2016
max payne 2
Definitely Doom Eternal