A well-known developer shows what is possible when a game is properly optimized. The improvement in the FPS rate is remarkable. This shows that it is worth bringing an optimized game to market. Because lack of optimization is a problem that many modern games experience.
Who is this developer? The developer and modder Peter “Durante” Thoman is quite well-known in the PC community. He developed “DSfix” for the original PC port of Dark Souls (2012). Today, he is the CTO of PH3 Games, a development company that creates PC ports.
In a post on Steam, he recently explained that he is involved in the development of the action RPG Ys X: Nordics. An early version is already available on Steam, but it has been heavily criticized for poor performance and the lack of an English language. However, a revised version is expected to be released in a few weeks.
Big strides in the first days, then only small improvements over weeks
What did the developer do? On Steam, he explained that there were significant problems at the beginning since the game ran extremely slowly with AMD graphics cards. However, this problem was actually managed. Overall, he and his team increased the performance of the game from 106 FPS to 314 FPS. This is almost three times the original performance. It took a total of 4 optimizations.
He explained that they chose one of the worst spots in the game for the optimization.
This is a location on the island of Balta that has proven to be an absolute worst-case scenario in terms of CPU performance. All settings are at maximum, except for resolution and anti-aliasing, to ensure the game is CPU-bound. We load a fixed game save and then provide the FPS after waiting 30 seconds to let everything settle.
The system is my development workstation, which is a Core i9 12900k with an RTX 4090 – but since we are interested here in a relative comparison between versions, that is not very relevant.
For example, he mentions that they removed an optimization from the PC version that was present in the console version: For characters that were far away from the viewer, the FPS rate was lowered. After they removed this setting, the frame rate of the PC version significantly increased.
Overall, there are many small improvements that, according to the developer, “are not particularly interesting on their own.”
However, he also reveals that at the beginning of optimization, large gains in FPS can be achieved. But the further you go with optimization, the less you gain. He also notes that it took only a few days for the first optimizations, but several weeks for the final touches:
When you start optimization, you can initially work on things that have a big impact on overall performance and possibly achieve large improvements very quickly. The more the software is optimized, the harder it becomes to make further progress.
What is also notable? The developer and his team forego cheats like DLSS or Frame Generation for their “optimizations.” These features are regularly used to improve frame rates in performance-hungry games, but they require a graphics card with the corresponding function.
Lack of optimization in PC games has been a topic of discussion in the community for some time. Many players now believe that features like DLSS lead developers to spend less time optimizing their games. In the end, games don’t even run without the wonder technique
: All major games are currently failing catastrophically on Steam – players believe: A great feature of graphics cards is to blame for this
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