Is Nvidia destroying game optimization to sell you new GPUs?

Are GPU manufacturers using backroom deals with game developers to destroy game optimization in order to sell you new hardware? A lot of my viewers seem to think so. What are my thoughts? Let's find out.

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[Kamerondiaz]

i feel like games are x4 or x5 times more demanding but they doesnt look x4 or x5 times better

[nugzmedallion]

I will say this: people modded Black Myth: Wukong in order to be able to use the cloud you receive in and is exclusive to Chapter 6 that allows you to fly throughout the stage, in all the Chapters. What people found were TONS of fully-rendered geometry that the player would NEVER normally see during a standard playthrough, including an ENTIRE SMALL CITY that was, again, FULLY RENDERED during gameplay, which had nothing in it and could never be accessed by normal means in-game. So there might be a *little* bit of truth to the whole "invisible bloat just to tank framerate" claim.

[skychaos]

Games hardware recommendations with frame gen on should be illegal!

[AmigoAmigo-wp]

Optimisations absolutely do exist. I will give a simple example:

Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport. Two games made on the same engine by different developers.

Forza Horizon: Absolutely masterpiece of game optimisations. Game runs at very high and stable frame rates while having one of the best graphics of this generation. And it does that in massive open world without any load times or visible LODs

On the other hand...

Forza Motorsport: Game runs like absolute garbage. Requirements are absolutely insane. 10gb vram for 1080p... And on top of that it looks like it came from 2012. While having no open world... Just one track to render. How is this even possible. It's the same God dam engine

[Razor]

In the case of tessellation, in crysis 2, they made the ocean render nonstop without culling, under the entire map, thus AMD/ATI cards would struggle, though it was used at a lower level under the map to remain well within the capabilities of Nvidia cards at the time.
those game studios never made "mistakes" like that before, until they were sponsored.

[IlSinistero]

The problem is that a lot of games don’t look any better, but need way more graphics power than a lot of older games

[Arejen]

cant wait for the juicy rtx 5050 8gb with performance of a 3060 Ti

[PixelShade]

This is why I levitate towards playing older games... It's just a much better way to play games on PC. You get fully patched games, you don't need to purchase the most expensive hardware to run them properly. Not to mention, they go on sales often and at cheap prices. I have no issue doing this to publicly traded AAA developers, where the money is literally feeding the wallets of insanely rich capital investors instead of the developers themselves. Indies and privately owned companies however, I usually pay full price at day one. :)

[bumblebeebat-texv]

Successful consumer marketing is about creating a need you didn't know you had, then offering you a product to address that need. It's the wonderful world humanity has created for itself.

[AlicanGoodmane]

Nobody talked about GTX Titan losing 4K 60Hz support with a driver update. So it wouldn't surprise me to see these kinds of driver updates.

[GRIGGINS]

I use to work in the Corporate world. Don't underestimate two corporations colluding together to do shady things.

[Dante_S_Turbo]

Crysis & nvidia did it before. They had extra tessellation outside the game map to hinder ati/amd gpus.

[CrashD]

The dude that bought a 1080 Ti back then for 1080p "future-proofed" his PC up to 2024, the dude that bought a 4090 to play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K will need to buy a 5090 to play Black Myth: Wukong and Monster Hunter Wilds at max settings, the card is what? 2 years old??? Future-proofing is dead.

[obgaming]

There is Doom, and there is everything else.

[marcelthorsen]

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Fuck yes.

[zagorim]

Optimization require competent developers and with the way the industry work right now, they are driving the best away and releasing rushed crapware.

[draon]

UE5 pushed by epic is likely one method they are doing with game devs, especially in cinematography.
You see many game devs not using the engine properly but also avoids using older engines that works fine like UE4.

[RAZGRZ]

It's outsourcing. The engine developers outsource. The publishers outsource. The developers outsource. Teams are spread across the globe on top of this. No cohesion.

[nossy]

I was yesterday playing part of the Battlefield 4 campaign. A 11 year old game you can run on a potato. Compared to recent games the graphics have barely improved but the hardware requirements have exploded. What happened?

[andr]

It's also worth mentioning that as hardware gets faster, a lot of software optimization work is going to be skipped, that would have been done (probably out of necessity) in the past. That's how a new game can come out running worse than an older game that is otherwise broadly comparable in terms of rendering fidelity. This might also have a broader side-effect of making the skills of writing efficient software more and more rare among software engineers as the demand shrinks across the industry. This can make it really difficult to build an optimized game like Doom 2016 because you just can't find people with the necessary skills who aren't already working for prestigious companies like Epic, iD Software, nVidia etc.