[devmor]

Why would there be a strong engineering culture behind AAA video games at all? Game developers are underpaid, overworked and constantly told they can be replaced at a moments notice.

I wouldn't expect anything but code that "ships" out of them, and its understandable why.

[pyrolistical]

There needs to be at least 1 person to figure out why the game isn’t hitting the performance target. That is real engineering

[mrguyorama]

In modern gaming you just make every texture max size even though it only covers a tiny surface and will only fill 6 pixels on a large monitor.

Also, half of their shaders are broken on some configurations. Also they used a function call wrong so their game tries to render something a bunch of times instead of once.

A huge portion of NVidia and AMD GPU drivers is literally hacks to make games actually run well. Both Nvidia and AMD patch game shaders at runtime to keep things from being unusable, and hack around broken behavior or wrong usage of APIs. It's exactly reminiscent of the situation Windows 95 had when all sorts of popular programs couldn't even save interrupt flags properly because they straight up did not read the manual which had many sentences and code fragments demonstrating that what they wrote would not work.

Also, Titanfall 1 shipped with like 30gb of uncompressed audio. They did this to "reduce CPU load". In 2014.

[maccard]

Hi, I’m a game developer.

> in modern gaming you just make every texture max size even though it only covers a tiny surface

This completely false. Not even hyperbole, just plain false. We have budgets, we have tools. You need higher res textures for things that are smaller because you can get close to them. Is there waste? Sure, but no more so than in any other field. My local newspaper takes 15 seconds to load on gigabit WiFi, and hangs on scroll. Reddit can’t handle more than one tab open. Slack uses more ram than the game im developing sometimes. Even HN still falls flat on its face with a “moderately” popular link, and can’t handle it if you perform too many operations.

> A huge portion of NVidia and AMD GPU drivers is literally hacks to make games actually run well.

This is because nvidia and AMD offer this as service but without access to your codebase. The days of them being required to function are long behind us.

> Titanfall 1 shipped with like 30gb of uncompressed audio. They did this to "reduce CPU load". In 2014.

As I’ve said many times, you might disagree but it was intentional. The Xbox one was an 8x1. 75GHz CPU, and some of that was reserved for system use

All software is shit, and held together by duct tape. All industries have products that we can point at and call a disgrace - it’s not games that are the problem.

[lelanthran]

> Slack uses more ram than the game im developing sometimes.

I think this should be said more often: the ratio of content to non-content is absurd in some electron-based apps.

Look at it this way: the average video game probably has about 30GB (uncompressed) of content and uses about 10GB-12GB of RAM.

In a busy slack, with hundreds of messages, we're still only looking at maybe <5MB of content while the app chews up 800MB - 100MB of RAM.

I think the video game devs are doing a much better job at writing desktop software than the Slack/Postman/etc guys.

Additionally, security in video games (it's poorest metric) has, over the last 10 years or so, improved considerably, while efficiency in desktop software (it's poorest metric) has gotten worse!

It's unfair to single out video game developers for poor software considering that they are making gains in their weakest measurement while those doing the criticising are happily using software that is losing points in it's weakest metric.

[mrguyorama]

>As I’ve said many times, you might disagree but it was intentional. The Xbox one was an 8x1. 75GHz CPU, and some of that was reserved for system use

I'm sorry, the Xbox One was a what CPU?

Doesn't matter, it's possible that loading in uncompressed audio takes more CPU and RAM resources than just decompressing good MP3 audio. Nobody else ships uncompressed audio, and Titanfall 2 did not release with uncompressed audio.

Mind you, this was like 30gb of uncompressed audio, including several different audio languages. No matter how you played the game, most of that 30gb was unused.

[kcb]

You could decode a 320kbps mp3 on an 83mhz Pentium I.

[lelanthran]

> You could decode a 320kbps mp3 on an 83mhz Pentium I.

Only if doing nothing else at the same time!

I was there; I had a 486 that could decode 96kbps mp3.

But, like the P1, if you tried to do anything else while decoding mp3s, the entire computer, including the sound output, would stutter.

I'm not defending 30GB of uncompressed audio (obviously they could have compressed it a little, at least), but to claim that a P1@80MHz could indeed decode mp3s@320kbps is a bit of a stretch.

It could do so only if you weren't doing anything else at the time.

[devmor]

How about 30-40 of them at the same time, while sending off video to be rendered by the GPU, tracking as many entities positions 60x per second and more?

[DrillShopper]

With DLSS nobody bothers anymore. Just force the punters to buy an overpriced video card and then poor-shame them if they don't