We saw several problematic PC releases this year. Here’s what PC ports need to do to be better next year.
I’ve said it once, and I’ll saw it again: 2023 wasn’t a great year for PC gaming. We saw some excellent games, but most were marred by poor ports that exhibited performance issues, bugs, and other game-breaking problems. Even at the end of the year, though, things are looking up, and I hope that trend continues into 2024.
Rather than rehashing the performance issues we’ve seen on PC all year, I want to look forward. Here are the five things I want to see out of PC releases next year.GPU decompression
There were a few common threads across PC ports in 2023, but one of the most prominent was the lack of GPU decompression. As I’ve written about previously, the Xbox Series X and PS5 have dedicated decompression hardware, which equals the computational power of almost a full CPU. PCs don’t have a dedicated decompression processor, but you can offload some of that work to the GPU.
We’ve heard about Microsoft’s DirectStorage, which is currently available in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart with GPU decompression. In addition, Nvidia has its RTX IO feature, which we saw vastly improve loading times in the demanding Portal Prelude RTX.
Faster loading times are great, but the real advantage of GPU decompression is the IO bottleneck you can see in some PC games. If the GPU decompresses assets, that takes some strain off of the CPU. In titles like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which poorly scale across the high thread count available on modern CPUs, getting past the IO bottleneck can help reduce traversal stutter that’s caused by invisible loading zones.
Here’s how Nvidia explains it: “RTX IO alone cannot completely remove stutter, but it can be an aiding technology to help reduce stuttering. It can do so by scaling down the dependence on CPU compute when the need to load textures and geometries ‘faster’ is the cause of stuttering, and freeing up the CPU to work on other tasks.”Frame gen for all
I’m tired of the DLSS 3 and FSR 3 debacle. Every major AAA release should include the latest upscaling and frame generation tools from Nvidia and AMD. If you’re going to include one, you must include the other. There’s really no excuse at this point. Within a week of AMD releasing the source code for FSR 3, modders created a tool that could utilize FSR 3 in any game that already had DLSS 3.
Frame generation is important, but we saw a nasty dynamic between FSR and DLSS this year overall.
