Why are Powerful GPUs Struggling with the Latest Games

 Gaming culture has been spreading like wildfire. More and more people are getting into gaming and the industry is responding accordingly with more people pursuing game dev, more and more game dev studios emerging with some great games. However, the demand for more games has led to major performance issues even powerful GPUs. Let's explore the causes of these issues in this article.

1. Poor Optimisation and Rushed Launch

Rushed Launch:

Many games released today are unoptimized and inefficient, causing stuttering, lag, sudden frame drop, etc from day one. This creates a bad first impression for the games; needing multiple patches to fix these issues. Apart from being very graphically intensive, games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong had severe performance issues at launch. Cyberpunk was a nightmare for early gamers with glitches and bugs making it unplayable; getting it a bad reputation.

Unoptimised Games Engines:

Games that are ported from console to PC aren't as optimised as they should be for a PC, like Last of Us Part One (PC Port) which had severe stuttering issues when it was ported to PC. Star Wars Jedi: Survivors is also an example of poor optimisation; even one of the most powerful GPUs: the  RTX 4080 was struggling against it, which wouldn't have happened if it were optimised.

Unreal Engine 5:

Unreal Engine 5 by Epic Games is by far one of the most advanced game dev engines. With its advanced physics and the ability to create visually stunning graphics, it is a very popular engine among game studios that want to create complex games, but it is a very heavy engine older GPUs like the RTX 3080 cannot take it so well on high to very high setting even though it should be able to. The 3080 is old but it doesn't mean it cannot run the latest games, it is competent, but sometimes when the games are such performance hogs, the GPU might struggle a little.

2. Intensive Graphics

Overly Detailed Game Models:

Gamers today like details in every little thing, be it small particles, fine details, slightly improved shading or simply- just more pixels. In pursuit of that; developers tend to over-engineer small details which aren't very noticeable unless and until you stare at them for a while or zoom in. All of that, kind of piles up and takes up a lot of processing power, which makes your PC slower and causes thermal issues.

Ray-Tracing and Path-Tracing:

You might be familiar with Ray Tracing up until now, but if you are not I'll just explain it in very simple terms: basically, Ray Tracing is a very advanced graphics technology for GPUs that makes light behave more realistically, and Path Tracing is a more advanced version of Ray Tracing. Ray Tracing is very heavy on older GPUs like the RTX 30 series and even the RTX 4090 struggles to keep high frame rates with Path Tracing in these settings. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake are prime examples of Path Tracing usage.

  

4K Resolution (1440p):

The trend for high-resolution gaming has skyrocketed with the onset of the RTX 40 series. This has created a new industry standard for high-quality gaming experience. But 4K gaming requires the GPU to process way more pixels (1080p to 1440p) than before that too at High settings which is a huge toll on the GPU, reducing frames by a large margin and consuming a lot of VRAM. At this point, even 16GB VRAM seems less for a high-quality gaming experience.

On a side note, I would like to mention that Stalker 2 devs GSC Game World sneakily changed the recommended system requirements from an innocent little GTX 1080Ti 11GB to a beefy RTX 4080. I saw this on reddit, so here is the original poster (OP): https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/comments/1grm557/the_recommended_system_requirements_for_stalker_2/

3. Hunger for More VRAM

Lately, the demand for more and more VRAM in GPUs has been on the rise; and why won't it be when AAA games are consuming more than 12GBs of VRAM. However, more VRAM is not the solution since it makes the GPU costlier. Budget GPUs like the RTX 3060 and the 3080 cannot compete and have to heavily rely on DLSS 3 which is also limited to some degree.

4. Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks are those situations where a PC component overpowers the others or in other words, when some components cannot handle another much more powerful component or a component underperforms compared to the others, resulting in performance limitation universally from all the components.

CPU Bottlenecks

Much to some people's surprise, the CPU also contributes to the functioning of a game as much as the GPU. CPU processes the game codes, physics, etc and if the CPU is slower than the GPU then the GPU get bottlenecked by the CPU, causing the GPU to not perform as well as it should and decreasing the overall performance.

Bandwidth Bottlenecks

Lower motherboard bandwidths like PCIe 3.0 slots while running high-end hardware on it (like the RTX the 30 and 40 series and DDR4 or 5 RAM) can cause some PC components to bottleneck, resulting in the same situation as before. I recommend getting a new motherboard with PCIe 4.0 slots or higher.

5. Over Engineering

AI Computing

AI advancement has led to some insane in-game features like real-time NPC interactions and procedural world generation, which heavily rely on AI capabilities. These AI features rely on additional computing power from the GPU, putting a heavy load on it. Games like Star Citizen (AI NPC behaviour) and Microsoft Flight Simulator (Procedural World Generation) are some examples.

Advanced Physics

Game implementing advanced physics like destructible environments, realistic physics, complex simulation and fluid physics puts a lot of additional stress on the GPU. Havok, Nvidia PhysX and AMD FEMFX are examples of complex physics engines.

Potential Solutions:

If you do not want to upgrade there are some workarounds to this issue:

1. Upscaling

If you have a GPU that supports upscaling and Frame Gen technologies like DLSS by Nvidia, FSR by AMD or XeSS by Intel, you can boost your frame rates by a large margin at high graphics settings just by turning them on. But if you have an Nvidia 20 series GPU or an AMD equivalent of that; there is nothing you can do apart from having to turn your setting down.

2. Patches and Updates

Regularly checking for game updates, patch fixes, and GPU driver updates can lead to a significant performance increment. These consist of bug fixes and performance optimisation, giving a much better gaming experience so be on the lookout for that.

Conclusion

Even when GPUs are advancing day by day, the demand for better and more realistic gaming has outpaced it. This demand has also caused developers to use GPU-heavy and unoptimised game engines and then release the games in a hurry. As a result, GPUs are struggling to keep up with today's games which has led to poor experience. To overcome this, gamers have to resort to either turning their settings down, keeping a constant lookout for updates or just turning on upscaling. Developers should also focus on making optimised games which are not GPU-hogging.

Well, that's it for this article. If there is any topic or news you would like me to cover, leave it in the comments. This takes a lot of time and effort, so consider following the blog. I hope you enjoyed reading this article and have gained something knowledgeable and/or profitable.

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