Ada Freya
ada@zoner.work
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people always say that games were more optimized in the past because the system had more constraints
but that’s absolutely not the case. there are games that were super optimized, but a lot of them, even first party ones have massive performance oversights.
the difference is that we have the tools now to measure these things, and there’s a slight shift in the performance disparity.
consoles would bump up and tightly match specs, but the gap has grown. even in consoles there’s variety in hardware even in the same cycle.
i.e. the ps3 bumping down the transistor density for reail once and for the slim models can have a very small change in performance with actually measurable side effects.
now made worse with pro models, and multiple SKUs like the xbox series.
tl;dr
performance has always been not as good as it could’ve been, but it’s been hard to notice either because the tools to measure it weren’t there and the scope of the games didn’t mandate certain features or design paradigms
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yeah, studios like rare, factor 5 and id are exceptions rather than the rule, they set remarkably high standards for squeezing every last drop out of whatever hardware they work with and that's not really something that should expected out of everyone
it's also true that the majority of games tend to lean on the sloppy side, especially shovelware titles but as you said even first party titles tend to settle for good enough because most of the time it's not a good use of development resources to hyperoptimize
this doesn't mean that there isn't a worrying trend in terms of performance and requirements in modern games
on the hardware side of things, we are now ramming straight into the asymptotic wall of what's possible so in order to keep hitting expected generational gains, power consumption targets are being raised unreasonably high (nvidia's modern GPUs are absolutely bonkers in that regard)
and the software just keeps expanding to fill that space, AAA titles are exponentially more demanding for very little benefit (graphics have progressed a lot less from 2015 to 2025 than they did from 2005 to 2015), which makes them less and less accessible for those who can't afford to spend thousands on hardware
I also think it's insulting that such ambitious and expensive games end up with major bottlenecks; it's one thing when the game isn't very well optimized but generally runs okay, it's another thing entirely when it causes severe playability issues
indie games meanwhile simply do not aim as high so they end up being very friendly to older and lower end hardware
in general I think the pursuit of More Graphics is forgetting that fun is the most important part of a game
for me personally most modern AAA games look incredibly boring and I guess that's good for me since I can still play the games I actually want to play on my 8 year old GPU so whatever I guess?
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[GRLC] 
novenary@akko.wtf
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then you have shit like mario party 4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdH_fKXSZ4c) or even ghosts n goblins on the nes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRXXkFzpIPQ)
or gems like contra force which ran poorly because of cost cutting on mapper chip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOwhDcI3oMA)
unoptimized slop is not a new thing by any means
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Ada Freya
ada@zoner.work
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@novenary i don’t think it’s any more of a trend than it always has, just that there’s way more games now and the rate of game releases has increased, but it’s always been like this.
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Charlotte 
/Cinny 
charlotte
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@novenary @ada it’s likely also that for old games you do not remember the slowdowns as much as the rest of the game, and especially on consoles, them being built for fixed performance targets (it kinda doesn’t matter if your game uses 90% or 60% of frame time although the earlier is more likely to lag)
meanwhile for older pc games, whatever slowdowns there were back then have been completely smoothed over by subsequent pc hardware upgrades
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Ada Freya
ada@zoner.work
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@charlotte @novenary or the 2 minute load times
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