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Comment by amjnsx | Hacker News Reader

Not every game is on PC (e.g NHL series), and some popular games that are, aren’t the best versions available (e.g. Last of Us)

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NHL 97 is on the PC and that’s all anyone should ever need. :)

Plus sometimes I don't want to develop a high dimensional regression model for how the setting affects the fps or deal with all this shader compilation stutter.

It can be a lot of fun to squeeze out every frame you can, but other times I just want to play a game.

Atomic Heart had the best shader compile I’ve seen yet. It happened with a loading bar on the main menu and didn’t stop you from exploring settings. IMO the compile should be part of the install step outside the game though

The newest Call of Duty does that as well

There is never a reason to disable the main menu.

Just because everyone is doing it does not mean it was ever a good idea.

Setting up shader precomp is apparently a manual process that can be really developer intensive, especially in open world titles. That said, I agree, there is a lot of low hanging fruit that can be handled. Devs seem to be deciding between all or nothing and often just pick the nothing path.

You could just leave it on the defaults? You'll get better FPS than on console and higher quality graphics, assuming a decent gaming PC.

You still have to manage the PC and games. My console has never let me down when I want to relax. I do this for a day job, I prefer not to fuck with troubleshooting at night.

> My console has never let me down when I want to relax.

You've never run into the 'must update the system firmware and download a 400TB patch to play this game you played yesterday' thing, I guess.

Nope, my PS5 and previous PS4 both update(d) themselves while asleep at night. I only have to update games I haven’t played in forever. My internet is fast enough that I don’t care about that either.

When I had a gaming PC a few years ago, it always wanted to update something on steam or windows then restart.

My gaming PC always does that while asleep at night...

Depends on the game. My 5800x/3080 Ti doesn’t do much better at maintaining a stable 60fps in Jedi Survivor than the PS5 does. Recent triple-A PC releases have been super bad.

Unless you play on HDR/OLED TV, in which case the better colors give more quality than any graphical setting difference.

Oh, you mean like the QD-OLED monitor hooked to my PC?

PC HDR sucks a lot compared to consoles.

The defaults can be a double edged sword. Places like DF put out optimized defaults for really mainstreams config for just that reason.

If you have a 3080 ti or 4090, sure, you have paid to just push play and expect stuff to work (well that still doesn't solve the compilation issues), but then you are leaving a lot of performance / fidelity on the table.

However, if you are even somewhat underpowered (think of all the people that bought 6500 xt or 3050 because of the GPU shortage), you are going to have to do some type of manual tuning. Most users according to the April Steam survey use worse than a 3060 and a large fraction of those use something way worse than a 3060.

Plus the CPU side isn't always a solved issue. I play on an 64 core epyc I primarily use for simulation. I have plenty of power on tap, but the lower clocks plus NUMA arch force me to do some fiddling. And I'm spoiled on that front, over half of gamers still play on 4 and 6 core machines (again, see the steam hardware survey for April) that chock gpus very quickly.

A 300 dollar Series S may not show the most crisp image, but I often use mine to avoid the whole song and dance.

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