…but I thought performance was fine, why would something fine be their top priority? Pitchford couldn’t possibly have been talking out of his ass, could he?
Something I’ve kinda come to accept about Gearbox is that Pitchford is an ass and sometimes they farm out products when they shouldn’t (ACM bring the biggest example), but most of the devs actually working on the games really do care about the product and want it to be good.
Gearbox would be a much more beloved company if Randy Pitchford fucked off. He makes everything they do worse, like bragging about how terrible Duke Nukem Forever was like the company is proud of killing the franchise.
It’s not just stutters but also just general poor performance in the open world, such that I get about half the frame rate I would expect to see on high settings without frame gen. I wouldn’t be surprised if the optimizations here are like what happened with Assassin’s Creed: Unity where there was a bunch of detail that got sanded off of the world map in places that a player should never actually see it anyway.
I’ll check it out when it’s under $5. At this rate, maybe next year’s winter sale? I have a rig that is reportedly already able to play it but I don’t pay full price, ever. Even games I really want, and this ain’t it.
All he had to say was “we are working on it, in the meantime, use some frame gen, or bump your res down. Our bad”. But no, he had to be a dick about it.
Woof. I want to play BL4, I’ve always been a huge fan of the series, but like…I distinctly remember BL3 and watching Claptrap do that stupid Vanna White thing across the screen for ages after every update. I kind of want that time back.
Supposedly that's why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.
They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what's causing people's performance issues. I don't know that I agree, but there's probably part of it.
Fuck pitchford and all that. But this is an increasing problem that most games have. Shaders are getting more and more expensive and compiling them on the fly… when it works it works and when it doesn’t it is horrible. But having a mandatory “sit and watch this load screen for three minutes” starts you off with a HORRIBLE first impression during the period where it is easiest to get a refund.
It is why MS are setting up their convoluted, and destined to fail, system to add those to the downloads. Since people have increasingly been realizing that Proton/Linux weirdly have an advantage in this… that again mostly manifests during the first 30-40 minutes of benchmarking while writing a blog post.
I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.
They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.
I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.
The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.
Yes, there are issues with updates and cached shaders… I mean, look at the topic of the thread. But the vast majority of the time there are zero issues and, again, this has been one of the biggest causes of a lot of the “This game runs better on Linux than Windows!!!” because the fly by night org just rushed into a single scene and took very few samples.
Maybe they could add a setting to automatically start up the game in the background after an update. Since shader compilation happens right at startup, that could get the job done.
Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don't want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very... terminally online, but it's nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.
Also crazy that dev teams don't have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.
I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just... heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.
And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it's a stylized look and it's taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you're getting out of it.
Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I'll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.
Maybe if there were any variation at all in the dance. Or a cycle of two or three different dances he goes through. Maybe give him a hat at random intervals. But no, just the same nonsense, over and over, for five minutes every time you start the game.
I played BL2 at launch and don’t regret it. But I only just picked BL3 up again over the last couple of months. It wasn’t only the loading screen, but I will say I don’t think the writing shines quite as much as it did in BL2.
And when I’ve tried it numerous times I’ll let them walk me through the process while I browse the internet for a couple minutes while I “wait for the light to turn green”
Nope, it’s still flashing yellow, like it has been, and has been after the last couple resets of everything between me and the wall
Yeah, the process will be different depending on CPU, so I'm assuming 15 min is the upper bound they're expecting on the minimum supported spec or whatever.
If all the shaders are compiling in the background and it‘s stutter free (minus traversel stutters, I guess) after that, I actually find that reasonable. If I can get rid of stutters by idling in the game for 15m while doing something else, then sure.
But I have a hunch that it‘s still not a smooth ride after.
At least this is the most reasonable thing I‘ve heard from GB since release lol
My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.
I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.
And then there's the people talking about it who don't care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.
And then there's the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can't possibly help.
Lots of things on this one.
Still I don't think you're expected to idle for fifteen minutes. That's the point of the background compilation. You can still play more or less fine. Particularly on first boot the first fifteen of this should be a bunch of cutscenes anyway, and those lock at 30 (which I don't like at all and so many games do now for some reason).
Yeah sure but why didn’t they put a “Shader Compilation” loading screen then?
Many games have one that tell you what’s happening and give you an option to skip, better than having to find out via a tweet…
Here’s a dumb tech question: This happens for so many games, shaders compiling holding up the process. But after an initial compile, it seems like this is written to a file and doesn’t happen on every boot. So can they not simply include pre-compiled shaders?
They run differently based on the hardware you have. They can and might precompile for consoles, but there’s no way for them to know what everyone’s different pc set up is until it’s installed.
Fun fact: Steam (at least on Linux) shares caches between users with the same hardware.
Easier to happen on the Deck since it’s the same hardware for all, but even on my desktop PC I’ve seen it downloading and uploading shaders often.
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