this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.

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[–] notepass@feddit.de 189 points 2 years ago (7 children)

The problem is so severe, in fact, that the aforementioned translation layer had to be updated specifically to handle Starfield as an exception to the usual handling of the issue.

"I had to fix your shit in my shit because your shit was so fucked that it fucked my shit"

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 108 points 2 years ago (2 children)

This is how games and drivers have been for decades.

There are huge teams at AMD and nVidia who's job it is to fix shit game code in the drivers. That's why (a) they're massive and (b) you need new drivers all the time if you play new games.

I read an excellent post a while ago here, by Promit.

https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/5215019/

It's interesting to see that in the 8 years since he wrote it, the SLI/Crossfire solution has simply been to completely abandon it, and that we still seem to be stuck in the same position for DX12. Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don't look bad on benchmarks.

[–] mattreb@feddit.it 20 points 2 years ago

I'll give a different perspective on what you said: dx12 basically moved half of the complexity that would normally be managed by a driver, to the game / engine dev, which already have too much stuff to do: making the game. The idea is that "the game dev knows best how to optimize for its specific usage" but in reality the game dev have no time to deal with hardware complexity and this is the result.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago

As far as wedding vows go, they're not the MOST romantic.. 🤷

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[–] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 99 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Bethesda needs to start handing out checks to these people for fixing their fucking games dude

[–] nailbar@sopuli.xyz 46 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Maybe it's their business model to have players fix the games for free?

[–] bfg9k@lemmy.world 35 points 2 years ago (1 children)
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[–] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago (9 children)

And you know to some extent, having a community help you with your games and find bugs is beautiful and probably pretty fucking cool for devs. But the fact is that the business side of things continues to put a sour taste in all of our mouths, devs included.

I really hope AI and the like push game devs out of big businesses and into self employment. Of all the types of people, I want problem solvers to have that life the most.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

AI is still pretty bad at writing code, and often makes up API calls that dont exist. I wouldnt get your hopes up just yet.

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[–] WHYAREWEALLCAPS@lemmy.world 22 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They owe them quite a lot...

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[–] FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago

Honestly, those Unofficial Patch mods for Skyrim and Fallout are amazing.

[–] Ser_Salty@feddit.de 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Well, they do hire a ton of modders

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[–] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

People actually need to stop doing Bethesda's work for them. Release after release they just push out buggy and unfinished product and community fixes it for them while they somehow take credit. FO76 was a huge mess exactly because people couldn't fix it. Bethesda is bad, and people need to see it as such. Paying full price for their products is downright insulting.

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[–] avater@lemmy.world 73 points 2 years ago (2 children)

only issue I see with the game at the moment is that they did not use those fly/land/dock sequences to mask the loading times. I think that would enhance the experience a lot

[–] Red_October@lemmy.world 25 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It really would have. Considering that my loading screens are scarcely longer than those sequences anyway it could have, should have been nearly seamless.

[–] avater@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

are you on pc? Normally my loading screens last about 2-3 seconds, which is really short and a reason that I dont mind them that much

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 years ago

I think that's what he means, he could load faster if the animation didn't exist and instead of using the time for the animation to load, you get the animation then a loading screen.

[–] PintShotRiot@lemmy.world 17 points 2 years ago

Exactly it almost seems like that was the plan and then something went wrong and they couldn't fix it in time

[–] CrypticFawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 56 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I'll play in a year after most of the bug and performance issues are fixed. Which seems like my typical response to any major game release these days; just wait a few months at first.

[–] KTVX94@lemmy.myserv.one 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Try Armored Core 6, 100% worth it day one

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[–] kilgore_trout@feddit.it 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Armored Core VI and Baldur's Gate III are two big recently published games that do work quite well. They stand on the shoulders of two respectable companies.

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[–] KTVX94@lemmy.myserv.one 42 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

"Just upgrade your PC bro"

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 35 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I'm amazed that Bethesda has one of the premier game developers in their stead in id Software and didn't bother to just use their shit. Instead they actively chased their staff away.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 26 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Bethesda the publisher and Bethesda the developer are different things.

The publishing arm seemed to know what they were doing, certainly enough for MS to buy them.

The developing arm is nothing if not consistent. You know what you're getting into. An RPG, with lots of character build possibilities (even if a particular build overpowered enough for 90% of players to accidentally stumble across it, like Skyrim's stealth archer build), a handful of memorable NPCs, no real character development, so-so performance, and a shitload of bugs.

If people are still buying them and still not enjoying them I don't know what to say. It's like watching Fast and Furious 10, and going "well that's fucking dumb".

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[–] doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

ID and Bethesda Softworks and both using different custom, proprietary engines. Retraining your entire studio on a new engine is extremely time consuming, especially if it's a custom engine with limited learning materials, like ID tech. There's a big cost/benefit analysis there, and frankly, if Bethesda ever did switch engines, I think they'd be more likely to go with Unreal for this reason. Current staff, and certainly new hires, are much more likely to be familiar with it.

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[–] irotsoma@lemmy.world 34 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Nah, Bethesda will just do the same as they did with the Creation Engine. Let the community patch their crap and never fix it.

[–] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It’s shitty but at the same time, if people are gonna do it anyway… idk it’s tacky and the audacity to slap a $70+ price tag on the thing? Fuck that

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[–] uis@lemmy.world 33 points 2 years ago

developer working on Vkd3d

I.e. graphics driver developer. Listen what he says, Bethesda, not many driver developers will point out where gavemdevs act stupid.

[–] heckypecky@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] emax_gomax@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

I'm so glad steam hired this guy cause if he was doing this sh*t to cover slack for Bethesda and the huge publishers all for just a personal side project I would lose any hope I had for humanity.

[–] Pratai@lemmy.ca 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

As usual, it takes free labor for Bethesda to get their shit working the way it’s supposed to. What a garbage developer.

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Looks like Hans implemented a workaround in vkd3d-proton 2.10, using the open-source AMD vulkan driver on linux (RADV).

Device generated commands for compute

With NV_device_generated_commands_compute we can efficiently implement Starfield's use of ExecuteIndirect which hammers multi-dispatch COMPUTE + root parameter changes. Previously, we would rely on a very slow workaround.

NOTE: This feature is currently only enabled on RADV due to driver issues.

I don't imagine it will take long for this to make its way into a Proton experimental release. Folks with AMD graphics who are comfortable with linux might want to give it a try.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Do we know for sure that the Starfield devs weren't able to figure out the problems with performance? I find often with companies, the larger they are, the more bureaucracy there is, and the more prioritization of tickets becomes this huge deal, where you even end up having meetings about how to prioritize tickets etc.

I would be surprised if the devs didn't know what was wrong already, I think it's more likely that management and higherups doesn't care about them fixing it right now.

[–] sethboy66@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago

Game devs have many teams all with different jobs, for a big game like this you'd typically have multiple teams dedicated to optimization in different areas (and between them). The specific problem in this case was how the game was communicating with graphics drivers (among others), which for any graphics heavy game is very fundamental to performance optimization. The problems aren't even an after-the-fact optimization sort of thing that teams should have to identify and follow-up on, batching jobs is standard practice when interacting with GPUs whether or not there's a translation layer.

When the devs of a core translation API between two supported graphics drivers that are commonplace in the gaming ecosystem have to write code to specifically fix issues with your application you've done something fundamentally wrong.

[–] pycorax@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A lot of posts like these also seem to imply that the open source community should somehow be less competent than these companies and are surprised that the open source community can fix these issues. But the open source community has a ton of very respectable and extremely smart developers, it shouldn't be any surprise really.

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[–] naqahdah@my.lserver.dev 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm inclined to believe this, and this likely isn't even the whole extent of it. I've been playing on a Series X, but decided to check it out on my Rog Ally. On low, at 720p with FSR2 on, I'd get 25-30fps in somewhere like New Atlantis. I downloaded a tweaked .ini for the Ultra preset and now not only does the game look much better, but the city is up closer to 40fps, with most other areas being 45-60+. Makes me wonder what it was they thought was worth the massive cost that the default settings give, with no real visual improvement.

Another odd thing, if I'm playing Cyberpunk or something, this thing is in the 90%+ CPU and GPU utilization range, with the temps in the 90c+ range. Starfield? GPU is like 99%, CPU sits around 30%, and the temp is <=70c, which basically doesn't happen playing any other "AAA" game. I could buy Todd's comments if the frame rate was crap, but this thing was maxed out... but not getting close to full utilization on a handheld with an APU indicates something less simple.

I'm hoping the work from Hans finds its way to all platforms (in one way or another), because I'd love to use the Series X but 30fps with weird HDR on a 120hz OLED TV actually makes me a little nauseous after playing for a while, which isn't something I commonly have a problem with.

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[–] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago (9 children)

Typical Bugthesda. Am only wondering how did they get this big by only releasing buggy products. I can't for the life of me remember a single product they have made that wasn't buggy mess that community fixed for them time and time again without any compensation. Not only that community didn't get any compensation, Bethesda tried to sell their work and pinch some more money.

[–] flucksy_bango@lemmy.world 20 points 2 years ago

Imo, despite the bugs and sometimes because of them, they're really fun games.

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[–] Magnus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm convinced large video game publishers make deals with graphics card manufacturers to force the end user to upgrade, the AMD and Nvidia deals are not for free access to new technology it's for which ever bids the highest price to sell more cards. There is little progression in graphics fidelity since 2016. We used to take giant leaps and now we take small insignificant steps.

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