PC Digital Foundry 'Special': Worst PC Ports of 2023

[crispy4000]

 

 

The games discussed are:

• The Last of Part 1
• Forspoken
• Redfall
• Dead Space Remake
• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
• Wild Hearts

 

Worst PC Ports of 2023 Ranked:
03. Dead Space Remake

02. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Spoiler

01. Wild Hearts

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I added a few details to the OP for reference

 

Also, OLOLOLOLOLOLO at what the Top 3 have in common!

[Remarkableriots]

48 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

I added a few details to the OP for reference

 

Also, OLOLOLOLOLOLO at what the Top 3 have in common!

What do they have in common?

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

4 minutes ago, Remarkableriots said:

What do they have in common?

 

I'm gonna let you guys figure it out

[stepee]

Dead Space isn’t on the same level as the other two to me. There is a little traversal stutter sometimes when moving between areas in a game paced where it doesn’t really interfere and it’s also an issue that happens on console not much different so it’s harder to say the port itself is bad as much as the usage of the engine. Beyond that it scales up very nicely on pc and looks gorgeous with great Iq.

 

Jedi Survivor is such a bad port especially at launch I’m surprised that Wild Hearts can somehow be even worse!

[Ominous]

U......SHADERSnreal EngSHADERSine 5?

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Ominous said:

U......SHADERSnreal EngSHADERSine 5?

 

Only two of those use UE and it’s UE4. They are all EA published. UE5 seems to be performing much better with comp stutter and a little better with traversal stutter than UE4 but there is still work to be done. But at least they are actively addressing it now.

[Ominous]

Just now, stepee said:

 

Only two of those use UE and it’s UE4. They are all EA published. UE5 seems to be performing much better with comp stutter and a little better with traversal stutter than UE4 but there is still work to be done. But at least they are actively addressing it now.

Oh so studders are "In the game" eh?  Good news for UE5 since it seems like that's where a lot of games will be going. 

 

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Ominous said:

Oh so studders are "In the game" eh?  Good news for UE5 since it seems like that's where a lot of games will be going. 

 

 

Yeah, it has shader pre comp baked in now (what took so long?!) but they need to work on the streaming still.

[Ominous]

4 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

Yeah, it has shader pre comp baked in now (what took so long?!) but they need to work on the streaming still.

It's amazing that Direct Storage has existed for years now, we have GPUs with over 20 GB of VRAM, 32-64 GB of system RAM, and some developers can't figure out how to make games run smoothly.....

[stepee]

4 minutes ago, Ominous said:

It's amazing that Direct Storage has existed for years now, we have GPUs with over 20 GB of VRAM, 32-64 GB of system RAM, and some developers can't figure out how to make games run smoothly.....

 

I think after Avatar using Massive’s Snowdrop showing such insane geometry streaming so quickly with such high LOD without any stutter whatsoever, Epic definitely has no excuse.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

27 minutes ago, stepee said:

They are all EA published. 

 

And that's what they all have in common!

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

It makes me wonder if there is some shared streaming code that EA studios all use. Something that works ok on APUs and shared VRAM, but not great on standard PC architecture. I don’t know. 

[Greatoneshere]

Why is the Dead Space remake on the list at all? I played it on PC at basically max settings and I've beaten the game and never had one issue that I recall yet it's on this list?

 

As someone who played Jedi: Survivor just a few months afterward on PC where I was hampered at every turn with bugs, glitches, drop outs, to the point it made it hard at times to enjoy the game (and made it hard to 100% the game) is really doing a disservice to EA Motive Studios' work on Dead Space remake PC.

[stepee]

8 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

Why is the Dead Space remake on the list at all? I played it on PC at basically max settings and I've beaten the game and never had one issue that I recall yet it's on this list?

 

As someone who played Jedi: Survivor just a few months afterward on PC where I was hampered at every turn with bugs, glitches, drop outs, to the point it made it hard at times to enjoy the game (and made it hard to 100% the game) is really doing a disservice to EA Motive Studios' work on Dead Space remake PC.

 

The tolerance people have will vary, but there is definitely traversal stutter sometimes in DS on any system when moving between rooms. Many, many games have this however and it might just seem like loading. The effect can actually be more so on faster drives than slower ones. It is something they probably could patch but have not so I get it to some degree but it’s soooo much less severe than others I agree you can’t compare. 

[Greatoneshere]

1 hour ago, stepee said:

 

The tolerance people have will vary, but there is definitely traversal stutter sometimes in DS on any system when moving between rooms. Many, many games have this however and it might just seem like loading. The effect can actually be more so on faster drives than slower ones. It is something they probably could patch but have not so I get it to some degree but it’s soooo much less severe than others I agree you can’t compare. 

 

I mean that's there but hardly noticeable and certainly not worth damning the port over. My game ran off an SSD and while I experienced the barest of stutters it didn't feel any more than any other game I play on console or PC, not by much anyway. 

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

I mean that's there but hardly noticeable and certainly not worth damning the port over. My game ran off an SSD and while I experienced the barest of stutters it didn't feel any more than any other game I play on console or PC, not by much anyway. 

 

I feel like it’s partially because DF posts on resetera and for some reason resetera really latched on to that and acts like its game breaking :P

[Greatoneshere]

3 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

I feel like it’s partially because DF posts on resetera and for some reason resetera really latched on to that and acts like its game breaking :P

 

Top 3 is incredibly and unduly harsh if you've played Jedi: Survivor. I expect DF to typically be more objective.

[AbsolutSurgen]

Just now, Greatoneshere said:

 

Top 3 is incredibly and unduly harsh if you've played Jedi: Survivor. I expect DF to typically be more objective.

The stutter was brief and was only noticeable to me when going between areas. 
My only issue was the crashing until I turned off Ray Tracing in Jedha. 

[Paperclyp]

Oh shit should I have bought dead space on ps5 instead? I haven’t played it yet just got it on sale…

[stepee]

11 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Oh shit should I have bought dead space on ps5 instead? I haven’t played it yet just got it on sale…

 

Has traversal stutter on ps5 too, only way to avoid it really is to play the original.

[Greatoneshere]

47 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

My only issue was the crashing until I turned off Ray Tracing in Jedha. 

 

I sometimes couldn't even play Jedi because it got so bad at times and I have a decent rig. Glad some had a better experience, I never could crack a consistent 40fps at best.

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

I sometimes couldn't even play Jedi because it got so bad at times and I have a decent rig. Glad some had a better experience, I never could crack a consistent 40fps at best.

 

Its pretty decent now if you have a 4000 series with frame gen to brute force past the cpu bottleneck, but yeah it obviously doesn’t excuse how bad the port is.

[AbsolutSurgen]

17 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

I sometimes couldn't even play Jedi because it got so bad at times and I have a decent rig. Glad some had a better experience, I never could crack a consistent 40fps at best.

I was playing 90fps most of the time.   Small dips down to the 70s.

[Xbob42]

The stutter in Dead Space is total dogshit on PC, and if you can't notice it, that lack of basic perception is impressive. Literally any time you get near any door in the game (hint: the game is fucking full of doors) or hit certain load trigger points (usually these are next to doors, sometimes they're halfway down a hallway) you get a quite noticeable stutter. Certain areas are much worse than others, but you're not escaping it no matter your hardware. It's ever-present and completely kills the atmosphere for me. It's like a scratched up DVD, just stutter after stutter after stutter.

 

I cranked all the settings to minimum, set the game to the lowest possible resolution and even tossed on a 30 FPS cap and you still get the stutters. And that's on a 7GB/s SSD!

Game actually made a pretty good first impression on me, saw some stutter but figured they might've been one-offs or shader compilation. The game when not stuttering runs beautifully at a very high FPS at max settings. Then I played and realized the stutters not only weren't going away, but getting worse the farther into the game you got. It suuuucked. It'd be an amazing port if they fixed that singular issue, but they clearly never will.

[Paperclyp]

I was gonna say I wonder if they’ll ever fix it?

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

18 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

I was gonna say I wonder if they’ll ever fix it?

doubtful. There’s a part of me that wonders if they even can without a complete overhaul to how the game loads/streams in data. 
 

it’s just so weird that across different devs using different engines they have the same issue. EA as a publisher is the only common denominator we know of. As they point out the stutters in Jedi Fallen Order never got fixed. 

[crispy4000]

I actually haven’t watched the video yet, but going by DF’s discussions of these games in the past, I think they’re totally reasonable to harp on stutter.

 

You may not notice it (much) while playing, but they’re typically good about parsing out representative clips where the stutter is plainly obvious and distracting.

 

Most of us have played on older consoles where frame dips led to much worse experiences and frame time variances. So I think a lot of our tolerances and biases might come from that.  But when PC is supposed to be able to power through things with the right set up, it is unacceptable when a game comes out that can’t reach console-grade smoothness.

 

The solution of stutter on PC isn’t a simple one.  But it’s good that they call attention to it, so that engine makers and port teams don’t think it’ll fly with PC gamers.  If Jedi Survivor sells worse on PC, then good.

[stepee]

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

The stutter in Dead Space is total dogshit on PC, and if you can't notice it, that lack of basic perception is impressive. Literally any time you get near any door in the game (hint: the game is fucking full of doors) or hit certain load trigger points (usually these are next to doors, sometimes they're halfway down a hallway) you get a quite noticeable stutter. Certain areas are much worse than others, but you're not escaping it no matter your hardware. It's ever-present and completely kills the atmosphere for me. It's like a scratched up DVD, just stutter after stutter after stutter.

 

I cranked all the settings to minimum, set the game to the lowest possible resolution and even tossed on a 30 FPS cap and you still get the stutters. And that's on a 7GB/s SSD!

Game actually made a pretty good first impression on me, saw some stutter but figured they might've been one-offs or shader compilation. The game when not stuttering runs beautifully at a very high FPS at max settings. Then I played and realized the stutters not only weren't going away, but getting worse the farther into the game you got. It suuuucked. It'd be an amazing port if they fixed that singular issue, but they clearly never will.

 

Just fyi the 7gb/s ssd actually makes it worse than if you used a slower ssd! Which also might be why some people weren’t bothered as much as you. It’s there still for me, I see it, but it was pretty eh compared to some other more questionable releases this year, like Immortals at launch or even Hogwarts at launch.

 

Edit: Though, the list does shrink quite a bit when I think of other games that had issues that also didn’t later fix them

[stepee]

I think for the most part that stutter with doors is practically hard coded into the programming of the game and likely to never be fixed internally and since it seems to get worse on faster drives it will never be brute forced either. The only way I could see it happening is if it becomes a passion project for a dev there that does it on their own time or something. Or some enterprising young modder figures something out.

 

You kind of have to be okay with a little skip opening doors and enjoy the remake as it is or just skip it and hope they code the next DS better.

[Xbob42]

And in my case, it was skipping it. It's too much, too often, and its predecessor never had the issue. 

 

If we just had a mod or something that forced it to load the next 7 rooms or something or all rooms in a set radius, so maybe overall performance dropped or it used more VRAM, but you dealt with a single stutter once every 20 minutes or something, I would be largely fine with it. But every door? Every hallway? It's too much!

[Greatoneshere]

3 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

The stutter in Dead Space is total dogshit on PC, and if you can't notice it, that lack of basic perception is impressive. Literally any time you get near any door in the game (hint: the game is fucking full of doors) or hit certain load trigger points (usually these are next to doors, sometimes they're halfway down a hallway) you get a quite noticeable stutter. Certain areas are much worse than others, but you're not escaping it no matter your hardware. It's ever-present and completely kills the atmosphere for me. It's like a scratched up DVD, just stutter after stutter after stutter.

 

It's not that it wasn't noticed, it just barely affected anything for me so I didn't mind it. Certainly not to a point where I'd rank it 3rd in worst PC ports of the year. The stutter felt like it lasted all of a nanosecond when I experienced it, and it didn't impede my enjoyment at all. I remember when it released people were complaining about stutter, and I don't doubt it, but I really didn't feel it much when I played it.

[Keyser_Soze]

19 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

It's not that it wasn't noticed, it just barely affected anything for me so I didn't mind it. Certainly not to a point where I'd rank it 3rd in worst PC ports of the year. The stutter felt like it lasted all of a nanosecond when I experienced it, and it didn't impede my enjoyment at all. I remember when it released people were complaining about stutter, and I don't doubt it, but I really didn't feel it much when I played it.

 

 

On 12/26/2023 at 3:29 PM, Greatoneshere said:

A lot of people have this take and I just don't get it. Should we not expect A+ amazing from one of the most popular games in the world? In a world where they are doing interesting things with fucking Armored Core 6 and Lil Gator Game I just don't see why Dead Space Remake can't have that.

 

 

Which is it sir?

[Xbob42]

25 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

It's not that it wasn't noticed, it just barely affected anything for me so I didn't mind it. Certainly not to a point where I'd rank it 3rd in worst PC ports of the year. The stutter felt like it lasted all of a nanosecond when I experienced it, and it didn't impede my enjoyment at all. I remember when it released people were complaining about stutter, and I don't doubt it, but I really didn't feel it much when I played it.

Even in the DF video you can see very long stutters. The stutters all have some weird variance to them, which makes them even more distracting. I mean if it didn't bother you, it didn't bother you, but it bothered the shit out of me, and as I care about Dead Space far more than shitty ass Last of Us or Wild Farts, it makes Dead Space the #1 worst port of the year for me personally.

[Greatoneshere]

1 hour ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Which is it sir?

 

It's both - I'm not saying the game can't be criticized for the stutter (it should be fixed), just that it doesn't reach to make it in the top 3 worst PC ports of the year is all.  

 

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

Even in the DF video you can see very long stutters. The stutters all have some weird variance to them, which makes them even more distracting. I mean if it didn't bother you, it didn't bother you, but it bothered the shit out of me, and as I care about Dead Space far more than shitty ass Last of Us or Wild Farts, it makes Dead Space the #1 worst port of the year for me personally.

 

I get that, but caring about one game's PC port more than another isn't really objective analysis which is what DF is supposed to be doing. I played plenty of PC games that were buggier and glitchier for me this year than the occasional stuttering (and no other problems) in the Dead Space remake.