I think a lot of people are frustrated with games running slowly and looking bad especially when they look like a blurry smeared mess of pixels and that's exactly what we're getting here with monster hunter Wilds this video isn't just about that but it's kind of what sparked me onto this topic because this is a bigger Topic in PC gaming where it doesn't feel like the visuals you're getting are matching the performance that you're getting because it's one thing if a game looks unbelievably stunning and is difficult to run but it's another thing if the game
looks kind of mid and still is incredibly difficult to run uh let's freeze this here for a second and look at what the footage is behind me this is running the PC Benchmark for Monster Hunter Wilds at its default settings for the and by the way the recommended settings for the game on Hardware that's a bit above the recommended uh uh Hardware requirements for the game and this is running internally at 540p this is dlss performance mode on a 1080p display and it's still only running in the mid 40fps range in this scene and it's
looking super blurry to get there if you're on a tiny phone screen you might not notice that so much if you're on a PC size monitor you will by the way on phones you can kind of pinch and zoom and the PC uh system requirements for this game are really highlighting exactly the issues that so many people are frustrated with right now uh in a lot of games that have been coming out and these system requirements not only acknowledge these problems but they're running head first into it just like bam they are saying that in
order to hit 1080p 60fps you're going to have to upscale by the way they don't specify here but what they mean at the medium settings is performance mode upscaling so 540p internal resolution that's 50% at per axis which means 1/4 of the pixels of 1080P and then trying to upscale that into something that doesn't look like a blurry mess and of course it fails but also they're saying that still won't actually get you 60 FPS despite only being at medium settings and running at 1/4 of the pixels of 1080p uh they're saying you'll still need
frame generation in order to hit that 60 FPS and this is what people are frustrated with games that feel like instead of optimizing they are just uh turning on upscaling and frame generation and calling it a day now I wasn't in the room when this game was developed so I don't know exactly what happened and honestly I think that part of the issue is that the re engine doesn't seem to scale well to open worlds uh this is the game by the way trying to run at Native 1080p at the lowest possible settings and in
the same scene we're only getting about 37 FPS and I would argue it looks even worse than the 540p upscale to 1080p medium settings that we're getting here this looks more smear but at least is a little more cohesive and has a little more draw distance uh this is the lowest settings which just look extremely pixelated uh even a native 1080P and like does anything in the distance even have a shadow I mean it's pretty rough and again running at 37 FPS so this is where people are frustrated we're feeling like what I'm seeing on
the screen doesn't look that great and yet it's running terribly on the same PC that has been playing other games super super well for example what if we look at Horizon forbidden West let's this is also running on an RTX 3060 and this is also an open world game and it's running at its maximum settings here at around 50 FPS in a big populated town and as you get out of town uh it'll run it kind of in the mid-50s and that's at its absolute maximum settings and I don't think any would would anybody would
argue that this doesn't look great um and then also you can go ahead and turn down to medium graphic settings and now look I'm running in the mid 70fps range here and things scal down gracefully this still looks good yeah there's a difference between the very high settings and the medium settings in terms of like like the draw distance at which things things pop in but still looks quite nice and this is native 1080p no upscaling uh and then we get to this where at Native 1080p things look awful and are still only running at
37 FPS and uh if we go with the default recommended medium settings we're upscaling from 540p so things look extremely blurry you can see it kind of smearing details together um and then also I would still argue that things don't look all that impressive although generally art design is a bit subjective but that's really where I wish a lot more games would focus is can you design an art design that looks incredible without necessarily being super technically demanding check this out this is Ghost of sushima running at its maximum settings by the way also an
open world game I'm trying to be fair and compare open world games to open World Games although I know Monster Hunter Wilds is doing different things with its open world so it's not never a direct comparison but look at this this looks gorgeous but none of these tree leaves and the rocks and things like that actually have a massive amount of geometric detail or even really texture detail but when you look at the image on the whole it just looks gorgeous this is amazing art design not only that it can scale down appropriately if I
go down to medium settings this still looks gorgeous and now it's running 85 FPS on the RTX 3060 and again uh if we go back and switch to to this 1080p native resolution lowest possible settings we're getting 37 FPS now what if we turn Monster Hunter Wilds up to ultra settings and this is native 1080p the ultra would default to using dlss again kind of looking smear at 1080p if you do that so at Native ultra settings 1080p we're getting 28 FPS and again I'd still argue that well the this doesn't look that stunning or
anything like that and I think part of that is the art design now maybe that's subjective and maybe some of you guys are watching this you're like I prefer this I think this looks better and that's perfectly fair but I do think it is uh important to think about the overall art design and that it doesn't necessarily need to be technically demanding or technically impressive to live deliver something that is still visually impressive but a lot more performant and that's where I think ghost of sushima is an amazing master class and wow this looks beautiful
even if I go down to medium settings it still looks beautiful cuz it's the overall design it's not that if you zoom in on one of the buckets on the side of the road that you can count the grains you know of of lines in the wood and everything like that it just looks awesome when you're playing the game and it runs well now uh so when I'm talking about is a game optimized or unoptimized uh I would say that there's a few things that go into that because optimized doesn't mean it runs well I
think means it delivers uh an optimal uh balance between it's trying to achieve something visually and it's doing it in an optimal way right so if you have a game that is chasing the just most incredibly uh impressive visuals you've ever seen it might be justified to run slowly and that's okay like for example if we look at something like senis Saga hellblade 2 which by the way is not an open world game so I don't think comparing this directly to monster hunter performance-wise is fair and that's not what I'm trying to do here I'm
trying to show you that this game is trying to achieve basically uh what you would see in like a CG movie but running in real time on gaming Hardware I'd say it largely accomplishes that now it's only running at about 37 FPS at 1080p on a 3060 um but it's accomplishing something very visually impressive and also not only that but it actually does scale down to medium settings and still look pretty impressive and now it's running in the mid-50 FPS range uh but again I don't think we can directly compare you know the 37 FPS
in this scene uh to the 37 FPS in in this scene because again Monster Hunter Wilds is trying to be a big open world and hellblade 2 is not so that that is different but what I'm saying is a game running at 37 FPS doesn't necessarily tell me it's unoptimized it might be trying to achieve something incredibly visually impressive but I do think if something is optimized it should ma the visuals should match what the performance is and open world or not 37 FPS on something that looks like this seems unreasonable to me there should
have been a better way to scale down the visuals and increase performance uh while still looking good but maybe that would have had to have happened way back in the original design planning stage of the game maybe even as far back as choosing the engine because again uh looking at Dragon's Dogma 2 for example which is also trying to use the re engine in a Big O open world environment that one kind of struggles too especially when you get a lot of NPCs on the screen so this uh uh issue of being unoptimized could actually
just be an issue of by the time they chose this engine it might have already been too late for the game design that they were targeting and you know I think when we get to unoptimized games I think that's another thing is sometimes it is the engine Choice like Unreal Engine this which this isn't by the way uh actually a hellblade is is onreal Engine 5 um you know it it can be difficult to get this uh super performance so part of your your game design choice is what engine you use and for example uh
some of the games I was highlighting as as seeming to be a lot more optimal uh I think are using their own custom Uh custom engines like like uh with Ghost of sushima and like the Desa engine I know is being used in Horizon uh forbidden West anyway so part of it is the engine choice that is part of the game development process is choosing what engine you're going to use but I think another one is uh you know I think consoles are the lead game game development Target generally and what frame rate are they
targeting and what resolution are they targeting when they designed the original uh game and it's and its art right because I think that a lot of game developers when they started working on PS5 generation games several years ago were used to the console Paradigm where 30fps gaming was the norm and if that's the case and they're targeting 30 FPS for their original design choices that gives you a certain frame time budget a certain number of milliseconds in which each frame is going to be computed and if you instead Target 60 FPS you're losing a ton
of those milliseconds of time to compute the frame so I think that if a game is originally designed around a 30fps Target on consoles that's where we're seeing the ones where if you want to run it at 60fps you end up like like this is which is uh butchering everything with crazy levels of upscaling because the original art was not designed around running super well so you just have to reduce the uh the burden on the GP to to decrease the frame time cost by just cutting the resolution or just really um what what one
thing I'm seeing here when we go on the lowest settings or just really ungracefully butchering the overall art like they have the certain Target they were looking for and if you want to go below that it just kind of looks awful you're just turning off certain settings uh it just looks bad right this does not scale down gracefully so uh but again I think part of it is also just the engine Choice from the original place but in general this is what a lot of people are frustrated with games that are designed to run on
um you know reasonable Hardware like uh but to on that reasonable Hardware they're relying on massive levels of upscaling and even frame generation just to hit 60fps so I think game game designers need to realize that what a lot of people want is a game that plays well and part of playing well is playing at a good frame rate and honestly 60 FPS on reasonable you know console is level Hardware I think should be the default game design choice and you need to start the game from the ground up with that Target because if you
don't I think you end up in this kind of a situation and so again I'm not a game developer and I think all the different issues come in with different engine choices and everything like that um but I think a big part of it really should be designing art that looks beautiful without necessarily needing to be extremely demanding to run and certain games I think do that super well and I think everybody's happy with that when people get a game that looks nice it doesn't need to push all the boundaries but performs well I think
they're happy with that so people are looking for games that r that that that are fun to play and look good enough and run well right that that's what they want now I think it's totally okay to just have your own thing you're going for to try to push the absolute boundaries of what a uh rendering live can do that's okay if that's your game design Target and that's really a whole different thing uh but at the same time you know the actual gameplay of a game like this uh is also targeting something different right
this is mostly slowly walking right whereas a game like Monster Hunter you're in big battles this is about the gamep play it's not about being a visual showcase and yet somehow it manages to be incredibly demanding on the GPU it's it's it's a bit rough anyway I'm not quite sure exactly how to end this video other than you guys could tell me about every how you feel about the current state of game optimization in the comment section CU again I don't think I I think it's it's about does it match like is what you're seeing
matching the performance level that you're getting because a lot of times nowadays I don't think it is and there's something going wrong in the initial I think design phase of the game or the optimization phase of the game or both uh where something needs to be different because this isn't looking good and if we look at the uh the performance advantages we're getting from newer generations of Hardware they're looking to be getting less jumps in the future so it used to be the case that oh this game came out it performs badly just wait a
year and graphics cards are going to be like twice as bad powerful um we're not getting those huge jumps anymore either so it's at the same time as all of this is happening it's getting harder to just Brute Force Through It uh not that it's really great to have to do that anyway but anyway that's where we're at let me know how you feel about all of this in the comment section and I still hope all of you have an excellent day
