Mass Effect for PC is so well optimized it blows my mind.

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

Now this has potential to turn into a "PC vs. 360" thread but this is mainly directed to BioWare and other Devs., the 360 has a great graphics card, and 3 single core processors (!), and, I forget how much RAM, but, it still had texture popping and an assortment of problems.

Yet even though my graphics card is fantastic (8800 GTS) my proccessor is an old $50 dollar Pentium D Dual Core - and I've got a lot of RAM (3 gigs, don't get excited just yet! It was kingston value RAM and there was a special at Fry's, each was 20 bucks, so for 60 dollars I got 3 gigs of cheap but effective RAM, but there aren't any heatsinks or anything like that..) - but a lot of games still make my proccessor cry for mercy, many say I have a "super computer" but they don't know that it's a "Low Budget Super Computer" - so I still have issues, even S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Bioshock, Supreme Commander (this is the biggest resource hog on my proccessor power, yeah, not even Crysis sucks up this much) - company of heroes, and worst of all, Gears of War for PC (this is a bloody PC port nightmare, right under SC: Double Agent, don't even get me started) - and other games, will still have problems without enough patches (thank you steam and other services for "auto updates"), even the highly optimized ones like Source games or CoD4's online will get too demanding over a certain amount of time of online play.

So why is it that my "sounds great but isn't actually as good as it seems to be" PC can run this so well at Maximum graphics at 1280x720 but the 360 can't? Is it optimization issues or hardware issues? Sure most people don't have a comp. as good as mine but it would be nothing without that 8800, and if I'm getting such smooth performance with this game then surely other people with about 3 year old sytems should pull this off at minimum graphics, it may be pushing it, but the fact that it would have a chance is still amazing, the minimum requirements are around "nVidia 6800" level and the most it asked for is a gig of ram, and a single core proccessor...I can't think of many games nowadays that say "you can pull this off with a single core" (while the 360 has THREE single cores).

-and BioWare, this game looks beautiful and hardly sucks up any resources, even the reccommended specs. are not that demanding, but the only other developers I know of that released such a unbuggy game (and at LAUNCH too, come on!) is Infinity Ward and Valve - and Mass Effect came a lot sooner than PC gamers thought it would...

So now that my long drawn out intro is over - I want to know, is optimization hard? I mean, Gears of War for the PC came out a whole year on PC, and from Epic Games of all people, and there are still 360 buttons on my fucking UI - the single player is a God Damn slideshow on all settings (and surprisingly, Gears of War looks the best on low post proccessing, it takes off all that unnecessarily muted color), The Multiplayer is the only thing that makes me not regret buying the game, but even then, it uses windows live and makes communication in the game so hard!!! It took a year for this mess to come out? Yet Bioware takes Mass Effect and gets it damn near bug free at launch, and it took less than half the time to come out.

What makes optimization so hard? Why isn't there a piece of software that just has an "optimize" button and boom, it codes everything for you? Why are there shitty ports of Gears of War one whole year later, and why does Ubisoft have monkeys in their coding departments, when clearly, they need more people like Bioware and Valve in their offices! Hell, LucasArts said "we don't know how to make Force Unleashed on the PC" - because they said it would be too hard to code for both low and high end systems, when Bioware and Valve have done exactly that...

I will never EVER understand. Escapist users, for those who have read this, I'd appreciate your help if you gave me more knowledge about the world of optimization and why some developers just can't do it (Ubisoft, and Now EPIC...seriously wtf, these are the guys who made Unreal Tournament? Really?) while others have no problem (Bioware, Valve, Blizzard, Relic, Crytek - YES, Crytek, the game worked great at launch and the patch came out quickly and improved performance more than 30%)?

 

[schoolboyeric]

simple answer i will give you halo 2, and gears of war on pc uses windows live or x-box live or whatever shit microsoft needs you to run the game. This decreases your game performance by 50%, if you run gears of war/halo 2 without windows live it will run so much better its like comparing the processing speed of the 360 vs. ps3... Also side note if you run the game on windows xp(sp3 and an optimized version like i have) you'll get another 50% increase in game performance.. especially over vista(i have 1gb of ram and do not want to update)..no console has over a gig of ram so my computer does not need it either...
so to double performance on microsoft games
don't use windows live...
and don't use vista...
also use windows xp sp3(any optimized version, i use tinyxp i think its called)...

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

I may just try that! Thanks.

-and I've got XP sp3, I'll never touch vista, and I'll admit, I've got more RAM than I'll really ever need but it was a fantastic deal. I use to think 2 gigs would be the standard for PC games, but really, that's just for "worst case scenario" in bad optimization (see, Guitar Hero for PC).

 

[stompy]

Sometimes, it just comes down to the developers being too lazy, and not mattering enough about the PC market, becuase it doesn't bring in the money like consoles.

 

[Sib]

Supreme Commander (this is the biggest resource hog on my proccessor power, yeah, not even Crysis sucks up this much)

Fucking. AGREED. I've played Crysis on very high, everything turned on and not suffered slowdown, but that game in a 2 vs 2 match made my processor buckle and cry, hundreds of tanks on screen at one time is nooot easy for any pc to handle, damn "medium" difficulty NPCs only know how to spam medium tanks for the entire game duration. Also I run Vista, yes i can happily confirm it sucks precisely 0.5gig of RAM, just sitting there, because in the system diagnostics thing it says I have "3.3gig of usable RAM", I know for a fact I have 4gig of DDR RAM, so where did my other 0.7 go? Vistaaaaa and other misc crap in the background.

 

[Sib]

Double post, delete please?

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

Sometimes, it just comes down to the developers being too lazy, and not mattering enough about the PC market, becuase it doesn't bring in the money like consoles.

Well that's half-true, consoles are the go-to platform since it's easy to develop for and some games have more of a console fanbase (like fighting games) - but in general the PC is a good market, but if you don't optimize your game enough then someone will buy it, and then start telling people "don't buy this trash" and you'll screw yourself over, I mean, look at Guitar Hero for PC, the requirements are beyond ridiculous - I mean, what the hell were they thinking? Making a rhythm game have the requirements of Crysis?

That is when your game won't sell. Consoles are mainly the go-to platform just because you can half-ass it and still sell, now, when I say "half-ass" I don't mean it in a bad way, just saying that it isn't as tricky as the PC market. If you want PC copies of a game then you optimize the hell out of it, and just release it at the same time of the other multi-plat titles, and also put it on the digital download market. It's easier said than done, but when it's done, you are guaranteed more sales on the PC - Sins of a Solar Empire's success is a great example.

Supreme Commander (this is the biggest resource hog on my proccessor power, yeah, not even Crysis sucks up this much)

Fucking. AGREED. I've played Crysis on very high, everything turned on and not suffered slowdown, but that game in a 2 vs 2 match made my processor buckle and cry, hundreds of tanks on screen at one time is nooot easy for any pc to handle, damn "medium" difficulty NPCs only know how to spam medium tanks for the entire game duration. Also I run Vista, yes i can happily confirm it sucks precisely 0.5gig of RAM, just sitting there, because in the system diagnostics thing it says I have "3.3gig of usable RAM", I know for a fact I have 4gig of DDR RAM, so where did my other 0.7 go? Vistaaaaa and other misc crap in the background.

Yeah what's even weirder about Supcom is when it starts to lag, it's "smooth lag" - instead of stuttering constantly it just slows down, I can still have thousands of units but they just won't be moving as fast, it's kinda cool, but, after a while you just think "ok, this is too much..." - Also, Forged Alliance did pretty good at changing up the AI - you still had to manually click which kind they were but it still put variety into the game's other than "spam units".

 

[Sib]

Yeah what's even weirder about Supcom is when it starts to lag, it's "smooth lag" - instead of stuttering constantly it just slows down, I can still have thousands of units but they just won't be moving as fast, it's kinda cool, but, after a while you just think "ok, this is too much..." - Also, Forged Alliance did pretty good at changing up the AI - you still had to manually click which kind they were but it still put variety into the game's other than "spam units".

Yeah the smooth lag is wierd, you don't notice it at first but i meant it fully crashed after a while, the amount of wreckage on the land, the huge amount of units one guy just left in one corner of the map (over 100), to be honest I think thats part of the AI strategy, crash the game if you cant see a way of winning.

 

[shadow skill]

What makes optimization hard is the fact that memory management is simply not easy. Knowing the right way to get a computer to do what you want is different from knowing how to get it to do what you want in the most efficient way possible. It also depends on the kind of language used in all likelyhood you are dealing with C/C++ which is a language suited for high performance situations like gaming it also means that you are going to have to manage memory manually rather than rely on garbage collection. (For those of you that have some programming knowledge this means the dreaded pointer.) In the case of Mass Effect I think part of the reason that the game runs so much better on PC is that the hard drive was used to cache data unlike on the 360 version.

 

[runtheplacered]

and don't use vista...

I've had absolutely no problems using Vista. Since its release up until present day (Sp 1) there's been a lot of great fixes.. and the OS has been completely stable for me. I also do not notice a single dip in performance going from XP to Vista. Granted, I have a pretty nice computer.. but to just throw out "don't use vista" is horrible advice. Vista offers up some pretty worthwhile upgrades from XP.

Then again I find most peoples complaints come from "user error".

 

[Katana314]

I can pretty safely say that the person claiming Windows Live is an enormous performance hog knows very little about code. Vista has had different experiences of performance gains/losses for different people. It is impossible to say it "WILL" or "WILL NOT" increase performance.

It's just hard to optimize things. When someone says "Okay, we need to have it do THIS" often it's not easy to try to think up the safest, fastest way for the computer to do so.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

What makes optimization hard is the fact that memory management is simply not easy. Knowing the right way to get a computer to do what you want is different from knowing how to get it to do what you want in the most efficient way possible. It also depends on the kind of language used in all likelyhood you are dealing with C/C++ which is a language suited for high performance situations like gaming it also means that you are going to have to manage memory manually rather than rely on garbage collection. (For those of you that have some programming knowledge this means the dreaded pointer.) In the case of Mass Effect I think part of the reason that the game runs so much better on PC is that the hard drive was used to cache data unlike on the 360 version.

Yeah that DVD had a lot of space, and I'm so use to installs that I forget how big of a difference it could have made. - and about Languages, do people have to just code every tiny detail by themselves? I'm surprised no one has made some kind of program to do it for them already.

and don't use vista...

I've had absolutely no problems using Vista. Since its release up until present day (Sp 1) there's been a lot of great fixes.. and the OS has been completely stable for me. I also do not notice a single dip in performance going from XP to Vista. Granted, I have a pretty nice computer.. but to just throw out "don't use vista" is horrible advice. Vista offers up some pretty worthwhile upgrades from XP.

Then again I find most peoples complaints come from "user error".

Did you get it with a pre-built computer? Because I've noticed vista on OEM is buggy because I remember when people would upgrade, and then boom, no sound because vista isn't compatible with their 1 year old soundcard >_>

 

[Nugoo]

Yeah that DVD had a lot of space, and I'm so use to installs that I forget how big of a difference it could have made. - and about Languages, do people have to just code every tiny detail by themselves? I'm surprised no one has made some kind of program to do it for them already.

It depends on the language. Python and Perl require less micromanagement than C/C++, but they're orders of magnitude slower. Generally, the more efficient you want your code to be, the closer you're going to have to get to the machine's language, and that means closer to spelling out every single detail. In the lowest level, you have to say, for example, "Add the number in this part of the processor to the number in that part of the processor and put the result in this other part of the processor.", then you'd store the result (maybe) in RAM.

Fucking. AGREED. I've played Crysis on very high, everything turned on and not suffered slowdown, but that game in a 2 vs 2 match made my processor buckle and cry, hundreds of tanks on screen at one time is nooot easy for any pc to handle, damn "medium" difficulty NPCs only know how to spam medium tanks for the entire game duration. Also I run Vista, yes i can happily confirm it sucks precisely 0.5gig of RAM, just sitting there, because in the system diagnostics thing it says I have "3.3gig of usable RAM", I know for a fact I have 4gig of DDR RAM, so where did my other 0.7 go? Vistaaaaa and other misc crap in the background.

If I'm not mistaken, 32-bit processors (one of which is almost definitely in your computer, depending on when you bought it) can only address that much RAM. So even if you put in 4 2gig sticks of RAM, you'd only see 3.3.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

Yeah that DVD had a lot of space, and I'm so use to installs that I forget how big of a difference it could have made. - and about Languages, do people have to just code every tiny detail by themselves? I'm surprised no one has made some kind of program to do it for them already.

It depends on the language. Python and Perl require less micromanagement than C/C++, but they're orders of magnitude slower. Generally, the more efficient you want your code to be, the closer you're going to have to get to the machine's language, and that means closer to spelling out every single detail. In the lowest level, you have to say, for example, "Add the number in this part of the processor to the number in that part of the processor and put the result in this other part of the processor.", then you'd store the result (maybe) in RAM.

Makes sense, I heard Blizzard uses Universal Binary, hence why it's able to run on MACs (without bootcamp.)

 

[Nugoo]

Makes sense, I heard Blizzard uses Universal Binary, hence why it's able to run on MACs (without bootcamp.)

There's not actually a universal binary. Each binary language is specific to a family of processors. The most common one (which Windows machines use) is x86, which is used with Intel and AMD processors (and, I guess, others). Apple has only been using Intel processors since 2006. I have no idea how Blizzard got their older games to work with Macs with the same CD's, but they might have had two different installers, one for Windows, and one for Macs.

 

[Alex_P]

If I'm not mistaken, 32-bit processors (one of which is almost definitely in your computer, depending on when you bought it) can only address that much RAM. So even if you put in 4 2gig sticks of RAM, you'd only see 3.3.

Since 1 gigabyte = 2^32 bytes, a 32-bit processor can support 4 full gigs of byte-addressable memory.

If Vista's little utility is showing 3.3 gigs "free", then something really is taking up 0.7 gigs. It's not unreasonable to think that a big chunk of a modern OS is going to be that big.

Most likely, though, Windows will happily give a significant portion of that memory back to you if you actually need it. When you start playing a game that needs a lot of RAM, the OS will swap some of its little-used data to disk and let your game have the RAM that frees up (until it needs that data again and has to swap out part of your game to access it, at least).

You're not going to get ALL of that 0.7 gigs back because...
1. Data that's being used often isn't going to get swapped out, because it's actually in use.
2. The operating system will "wire" some pages, rendering them immune to being swapped out. Simplest example: your memory manager and disk driver are going to always sit in memory because if you ever tried to swap them out you'd lose your ability to interact with the swap device.

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

There's not actually a universal binary. Each binary language is specific to a family of processors.

You are correct. There is such a thing as Universal Binary [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_binary], though... it's just a "fat binary" format Apple created. Basically it's got x86-compatible binary sitting next to PPC-compatible binary in the same executable, and the system runs the kind that it can use and ignores the other one.
 

Everybody, take note: It's not a programming language. It's a format that you compile your code into. Basically any language you can shove into Apple's Xcode tool can be used to make "universal binary" programs.

-- Alex

 

[shatnershaman]

GUDAM crossfire or whatever that piece of shit is called looks bad and laggs its the developer
more than the machine.

As to vista I'm using it on 1.25 gb on a 4 year old computer and it runs fine

 

[neems]

It's not 32 bit processors that have a limit on memory, it's 32 bit operating systems. XP 32 and Vista 32 both have a 3.3 gig 'ceiling' for RAM, I gather it has something to do with memory addressing or some such esoteric concern.

A 64 bit OS will happily use 4 gig of RAM, and beyond.

The annoying thing is that MicroSoft know how to make a 32 bit OS utilise more than 3 gig of RAM, they have a work around that they used in various server based versions of Windows, they just didn't bother for XP and Vista.

I find it odd that Gears Of War is a slide show, even on a Pentium D - particularly as it runs on the same engine as Mass Effect. The vast majority of games are still designed to work on a single core minimum, and you have a dual core, albeit an older one. I would check the forums, make sure it's patched etc. I seriously doubt it has anything to do with Windows Live though.

 

[Sib]

Oh, I didn't know that a 32bit could only process about 3.3gig, so the other 0.7 is just floating around doing nothing or what?