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Sony sucks at porting games to PC

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Meh. As a PS3, PS4 and now PS5 owner having to sit through PC games getting lazy ports on consoles that dont take advantage of console architecture, cry me a river. I played some stunning PS3 exclusives by Sony and then some nasty looking trash from EA and Ubisoft all gen. Last gen was a bit better but once again Sony exclusives were doing things even the best studios werent doing because they were simply not utilizing PS4's strengths like the first party studios did.

Now, PC gamers see what it is like.

The only sympathy i have are for bugs like this Uncharted aiming issue, but we had that on consoles too at Uncharted 3's launch. Completely busted analog aiming controls. No idea how they shipped the game like this. Took them 3 weeks to fix and we had all beaten the game by then.

With Sony now moving to day one releases, at least for GaaS games for now, they will likely do dev on PCs and downport to consoles like third party games did so this is only temporary. They are already changing up their workflow so you can get better versions on day one. Just have some patience.
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Their ports are good, not perfect for sure, but really good, but what is perfect?
Name one game that launched on PC without a single issue.

There are a lot more publishers/developers that screw their PC releases to whine about.

EDIT: And that's not to defend Sony, they can improve and they should, but "Sucks at porting games on pc" is a ridiculous statement.
Yeah they have been 'fine'. This is just an extra revenue stream and a bit of a exploration for them currently so they aren't going to be pushing optimization and QA to the max.
 
Meh. As a PS3, PS4 and now PS5 owner having to sit through PC games getting lazy ports on consoles that dont take advantage of console architecture, cry me a river. I played some stunning PS3 exclusives by Sony and then some nasty looking trash from EA and Ubisoft all gen. Last gen was a bit better but once again Sony exclusives were doing things even the best studios werent doing because they were simply not utilizing PS4's strengths like the first party studios did.

Now, PC gamers see what it is like.

The only sympathy i have are for bugs like this Uncharted aiming issue, but we had that on consoles too at Uncharted 3's launch. Completely busted analog aiming controls. No idea how they shipped the game like this. Took them 3 weeks to fix and we had all beaten the game by then.

With Sony now moving to day one releases, at least for GaaS games for now, they will likely do dev on PCs and downport to consoles like third party games did so this is only temporary. They are already changing up their workflow so you can get better versions on day one. Just have some patience.
If you could beat the game then it wasn't that big of a deal.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
Its not the ports that suck, its the games. I don't remember playing a single game on the ps4 that didn't have less than desirable performance that wasn't a remaster.
 

Hydroxy

Member
As long as we keep getting quality Sony first party games on PC, I am happy to live with these issues. No PC port is perfect. Just be happy we PC gamers are getting the opportunity to experience these quality games.
 

yamaci17

Member
People praised God of War at launch for being an excelent port.

It's the only DX11 game that requires Feature Level DX11_1, in existence.
Doesn't have Exclusive Fullscreen.
Doesn't have DX12
To my knowledge, you now need 13th gen Intel CPU to hold 120 fps locked throughout the entire game, otherwise drops all over the place.
It was ridiculous CPU bound in general, becoming a stuttery mess on AMD GPUs especially. This coming from a game that ran on extremely low IPC, Bulldozer era 1.6 GHz cores.
Ridiculously heavy on slightly better than base PS4 visuals.
i dont know about 13700k but you can run god of war at locked 30 or 35+ fps on 1.1 ghz zen cores (a near match for 2.2 ghz jaguar cores found on pro model)



i know frametime graph is very bad (similar to unlocked fps mode of ps4 pro) but its just a proof of concept. you can practically lock it to 30 with a gpu bound framelimiter (nvcp is perfect for this) and happily game away

just because game does not scale for higher end cpus does not mean it actually runs super bad on CPUs. you can practically match the console performance or be %20-30 near it with equivalent CPUs. problematic part is the scaling. and developers do not have to make their engines scale for their PC ports. if it works good enough on a fx 6300 or ryzen 1600, they will ship it. what happens on upper end is not a concern for them, nor would it be.

by logic, if 13700k is barely needed to lock to 120,

13700k 120 fps
2700x 4 ghz (base) 60 fps (13700k is around 2x faster than 2700)
1.1 ghz 2700... should be 15-18 fps. instead, it is 35+ fps


this alone proves that the game simply refuses to scale forward. does not mean it won't scale backwards. clearly in this case, it scales good enough for lowend CPUs.

logically, if 1.1 ghz zen cores are getting 35 frames, 13700k should lock to 200 or so FPS, and base 2700x should also be able to do 100+ FPS. but none of it is happening. clearly game does not scale very good with high frequencies. its probably simply the nature of the engine. after all you said so yourself, game is designed around low IPC cores with low frequencies. it is what it is.
 
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rodrigolfp

Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
Pc gaming will always get bad ports due to the platform's very diverse nature. Devs aren't going to make the effort to optimise or make things run well. Its one of the biggest drawbacks with pc gaming.
But, almost always, the bad ports are far better than the best console version.
Its not the ports that suck, its the games. I don't remember playing a single game on the ps4 that didn't have less than desirable performance that wasn't a remaster.
It's both.
 

tommib

Member
Can I call this bullshit? Their STEAM reviews are super good. What’s this new narrative that their ports suck? Is this the alternative plan for warring since that now they’re releasing games on PC they’re supposed to be shit?


Everyone was waiting for this to happen to get a win on Sony exclusives not longer trapped on PSX consoles. Now they’re here and the fresh plan b is that they’re shit.

Interesting.
 

tommib

Member
Overwhelmingly positive shit port right?
NWfl6ER.jpg
 

Killer8

Member
I agree, but the problem extends far beyond Sony. I've come to the conclusion that PC is simply a terrible place to play games for the last several years. It's a trash headache that i've grown tired of dealing with.

It is usually not because of the hardware - it's always going to be king in that regard. And developers do often put in the effort to bring additional cutting edge features to PC games, like ray-tracing and DLSS. Sony in particular always go the extra mile with visual bells and whistles.

The problem is the shockingly bad quality control that is pervasive on the platform, as well as a reluctance by lazy as fuck developers to fix the issues. I have lost count of the number of PC games which have been ruined by immersion breaking stutter. Sony titles have been affected by it too (not just Sackboy, previous releases like Horizon as well), but I suppose the nicest thing I can say about Sony is that they at least eventually fix most issues down the line.

It's an extremely sad state of affairs that doing the bare minimum, up to a year post-release, is worthy of our congratulations. But the alternative is the countless PC games with horrific stuttering like Star Wars Jedi and Ghostwire: Tokyo that will never be fixed. I keep my consoles around for this very reason. Although a game on consoles may be uglier, I am much more confident that it will play smoother than even my high-end PC.
 
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MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
Overwhelmingly positive shit port right?

PC players love this game more than video game "critics" did when it was released on PlayStation. What a failure!

 

tommib

Member
PC players love this game more than video game "critics" did when it was released on PlayStation. What a failure!

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Horrible port. Unplayable. 98% positive!

If anything, we all know that with the right hardware, the best way to play these games is the PC. I don’t get this narrative.

There’s the Sackboy issues but let’s not pretend it’s not an Unreal 4 issue. I’m dreading for Returnal though. That game needs super consistent gameplay and no hiccups. I hope they allow for a shader pre-load. That game deserves to be launched at its best on PC. In a way, it’s a hardcore PC experience.
 
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Gaiff

Gold Member
Meh. As a PS3, PS4 and now PS5 owner having to sit through PC games getting lazy ports on consoles that dont take advantage of console architecture, cry me a river. I played some stunning PS3 exclusives by Sony and then some nasty looking trash from EA and Ubisoft all gen. Last gen was a bit better but once again Sony exclusives were doing things even the best studios werent doing because they were simply not utilizing PS4's strengths like the first party studios did.

Now, PC gamers see what it is like.

The only sympathy i have are for bugs like this Uncharted aiming issue, but we had that on consoles too at Uncharted 3's launch. Completely busted analog aiming controls. No idea how they shipped the game like this. Took them 3 weeks to fix and we had all beaten the game by then.

With Sony now moving to day one releases, at least for GaaS games for now, they will likely do dev on PCs and downport to consoles like third party games did so this is only temporary. They are already changing up their workflow so you can get better versions on day one. Just have some patience.
Not sure what you mean but PC players have been going through unoptimized and shoddy ports for a lot longer and at a higher frequency than console gamers.
 

winjer

Gold Member
Can I call this bullshit? Their STEAM reviews are super good. What’s this new narrative that their ports suck? Is this the alternative plan for warring since that now they’re releasing games on PC they’re supposed to be shit?


Everyone was waiting for this to happen to get a win on Sony exclusives not longer trapped on PSX consoles. Now they’re here and the fresh plan b is that they’re shit.

Interesting.

These are good games, no doubt about it.
But they are lacking in several technical aspects. As good games as they are, they deserve better attention and effort.

The performance issues don' t detract much from Spider-man. But it could be better.

On the other hand the issues with Uncharted and Sackboy are more serious.
Once again, these games deserve better ports.
 

winjer

Gold Member
Yeah, so you're asking Sony to put more effort on PC, efforts that will hurt the Playstation consoles.

Nah, at thin point Sony should just stop porting games on PC.

This is not a zero sum game.
Good ports on PC will sell better, whcih will bring in more money for Sony to invest in more games for both PC and Playstation.
 
It was with great enthusiasm that PC gamers received the news that more PlayStation games were getting ported to PC. But several of these PC ports have been abismal, with lots of problems.
Here are a few examples.

Spider-man for some reason, requires a CPU that is much more powerful than anything on a PS4 or PS5, just to run well enough.
It has Ray-tracing implemented, but the BVH traversal is done on the CPU, even of GPUs that have dedicated hardware for this. So performance is lower than what it should be.

Sackboy, has so many issues with stuttering it broke Alex Battaglia. During his review of the game, he couldn't even muster the strength to be angry, it was just lifeless disappointment.

Uncharted 4 had issues with mouse controls since launch and the first patch just made it worse. And it only got fixed a couple of days ago.
Steam forums are filled with people with issues with crashes, performance and graphic errors.

Horizon Zero Dawn had performance problems, and it took almost a full year for performance to be improved to a good level.

These are good games, but the PC ports are lacking in quality. This is bound to hurt Sony's reputation as a quality publisher, at least on the PC space.
Sony has to demand better from it's Studios, has to give more time for these games to be ported to PC, with the quality they deserve.
Sony, you have to be better than this.
Is the 3070 really that much more powerful in pure rasterization than the ps5? I thought it was only in rt and features where it pulls ahead
 
Spider-man CPU performance has nothing to do with shader compilation. If it was that, at one point, performance would have a big jump, after all shaders had been compiled.
It probably has to do with asset decompression and bad memory management.
Pretty sure it’s cause they can’t program a pc to offload certain tasks from the cpu like a ps5 cause it’s not standardized on pc
 

MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
The performance issues don' t detract much from Spider-man. But it could be better.

How it could be better? It's literally one of 2 games out now that support DLSS3. It supports every cutting edge PC technology available and has an amazing settings menu (before you even go into the game!). It's heavy on the CPU, yes, but it also has a positive effect and it's not like it requires an i9 to run anyway.

Yeah, so you're asking Sony to put more effort on PC, efforts that will hurt the Playstation consoles.

But they are lacking in several technical aspects. As good games as they are, they deserve better attention and effort.

Sony needs to give their PC ports more attention and effort. Give me a break. They port Uncharted 4 or Ghosts of Tsushima to PS5 and expect money for minimal graphical uplift. And on the PC side of things they add stuff like DLSS support to Horizon in a patch or are first to adapt DLSS3 (that literally doubled my performance in Spider-Man) for ... you guessed it ... free.

If you're talking about attention in a sense they should release games bug free then I agree. They should. But all things considered they're doing a decent job. Forbidden West was broken at release so it's not like they can only mess up their PC ports (60FPS mode was vomit inducing). But effort? Man, they patched God of War 12 times. It's perfect now. Same with Horizon. I call it effort.
 

Swift_Star

Banned
It was with great enthusiasm that PC gamers received the news that more PlayStation games were getting ported to PC. But several of these PC ports have been abismal, with lots of problems.
Here are a few examples.

Spider-man for some reason, requires a CPU that is much more powerful than anything on a PS4 or PS5, just to run well enough.
It has Ray-tracing implemented, but the BVH traversal is done on the CPU, even of GPUs that have dedicated hardware for this. So performance is lower than what it should be.

Sackboy, has so many issues with stuttering it broke Alex Battaglia. During his review of the game, he couldn't even muster the strength to be angry, it was just lifeless disappointment.

Uncharted 4 had issues with mouse controls since launch and the first patch just made it worse. And it only got fixed a couple of days ago.
Steam forums are filled with people with issues with crashes, performance and graphic errors.

Horizon Zero Dawn had performance problems, and it took almost a full year for performance to be improved to a good level.

These are good games, but the PC ports are lacking in quality. This is bound to hurt Sony's reputation as a quality publisher, at least on the PC space.
Sony has to demand better from it's Studios, has to give more time for these games to be ported to PC, with the quality they deserve.
Sony, you have to be better than this.
Just upgrade your pc, dude.
 

winjer

Gold Member
How it could be better? It's literally one of 2 games out now that support DLSS3. It supports every cutting edge PC technology available and has an amazing settings menu (before you even go into the game!). It's heavy on the CPU, yes, but it also has a positive effect and it's not like it requires an i9 to run anyway.

Better use of RT hardware. And better use of streaming and decompression of assets. Resulting in much lower CPU penalty. And better RT performance.

Sony needs to give their PC ports more attention and effort. Give me a break. They port Uncharted 4 or Ghosts of Tsushima to PS5 and expect money for minimal graphical uplift. And on the PC side of things they add stuff like DLSS support to Horizon in a patch or are first to adapt DLSS3 (that literally doubled my performance in Spider-Man) for ... you guessed it ... free.

If you're talking about attention in a sense they should release games bug free then I agree. They should. But all things considered they're doing a decent job. Forbidden West was broken at release so it's not like they can only mess up their PC ports (60FPS mode was vomit inducing). But effort? Man, they patched God of War 12 times. It's perfect now. Same with Horizon. I call it effort.

Uncharted has several problems, from crashes, graphics errors and performance issues. And it took them 2 weeks to improve the mouse controls.
Horizon, took a whole year to get performance to a good level. Not to mention some graphical issues, that you can see in DF's analysis at the time.

DLSS3 doesn't improve performance for free. It is just frame interpolation, like what we already got on many TVs.
But if you like that thing, good for you.
 

MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
Better use of RT hardware. And better RT performance.

Don't know anything about it. Played it on 3080: it was fine. Now I'm playing on 4090: it's more than fine, obviously. And judging by Steam reviews, it's fine for almost 100% people who played it.

Uncharted has several problems, from crashes, graphics errors and performance issues. And it took them 2 weeks to improve the mouse controls.
Horizon, took a whole year to get performance to a good level. Not to mention some graphical issues, that you can see in DF's analysis at the time.

And I'm sure they will fix these problems in Uncharted like they did for all their ports in the past. Why did skip the part where I agree with you that they should put more attention to make it right on release? You wouldn't need to write the obvious. Just a tip, if someone is agreeing with you, you don't need to try prove them wrong.

DLSS3 doesn't improve performance for free. It is just frame interpolation, like what we already got on many TVs.

It improves things significantly enough to make me happy to get it for free.

Same thing happened when they patched in DLSS2 to Horizon. Or FSR2 to God of War. All for free. It was a good day and a good effort from Sony.

But if you like that thing, good for you.

You have to hate yourself not to like it. So yes, this is good for me and every other sane player.
 

T4keD0wN

Member
While Sackboys UE4 shader compilation is abyssmal and uncharted menu is very lacking horizon being bad for months is not relevant anymore. Their ports have more features and run better than what most other publishers put out. Id love to see direct storage in spider-man because even 2022 cpus limiting you there if you enable rtx is pretty wild.
 
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winjer

Gold Member
Don't know anything about it. Played it on 3080: it was fine. Now I'm playing on 4090: it's more than fine, obviously. And judging by Steam reviews, it's fine for almost 100% people who played it.

Of course it was fine on such a GPU. But if it used the hardware aceleration for BVH that nvidia has on their GPUs, it would run even better.

And I'm sure they will fix these problems in Uncharted like they did for all their ports in the past. Why did skip the part where I agree with you that they should put more attention to make it right on release? You wouldn't need to write the obvious. Just a tip, if someone is agreeing with you, you don't need to try prove them wrong

Yes, they will probably improve things in Uncharted. But like you say, they should pay more attention to it on release.
This game is already an old title, so waiting a few more months for some due polish, would be very acceptable.

It improves things significantly enough to make me happy to get it for free.

Free things are always good. But in this case, I bet it wasn't Sony and Nixxes that did the work.
NVidia has a team of engeeners that they send to game developers, to implement their new tech.

Same thing happened when they patched in DLSS2 to Horizon. Or FSR2 to God of War. All for free. It was a good day and a good effort from Sony.

Yes, it's good that Sony improved their games.
But the matter at hand is the problems at launch. And in this, I think we both agree that Sony needs to do better.

You have to hate yourself not to like it. So yes, this is good for me and every other sane player.

Considering the added latency and temporal artifacts every other frame, it's not a tech I would support.
 

iHaunter

Member
Would you say the same thing about From Soft? Elden Ring had one of the worst PC ports in modern history. I had to buy it on PS5 it was so bad on PC. I have a 3080Ti.
 

dano1

A Sheep
Companies that make games only for PC have a hard time making them work on all the variations! Part of the PC fun…
 

Stuart360

Member
To be fair to Sackboy, i'm convinced they only ported that game (and ported it on the cheap) just to show PC only gamers that Sony make more than just third person action games.

I feel most of Sony's ports have been solid, not amazing but very solid. In fact my only real problem with Sony's ports so far (especially the PS4 ports) is that you need considerably more powerful hardware than the console to reach similar results. I mean its like that with most developers but usually you will need only slightly more powerful hardware to reach console like results, but with Sony's ports you often need around double the power to reach console results.
It really shouldnt be that way. Its almost like Sony isnt giving their port teams enough time to really optimize the ports.
 

MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
Considering the added latency and temporal artifacts every other frame, it's not a tech I would support.

Have you tried it? I was sceptical at first but it works surprisingly well in Spider-Man and it Plague Tale. The only annoying part were the artefacts around some UI elements but it wasn't bad enough to stop me from using it. On my bigger OLED, with a controller in hand... if a game supports DLSS3 in the future, I'm enabling that sucker.

Regarding SONY ports. Yes, some of them are sub-par at first but SONY is truly putting the effort to add extra features and patch them until they as perfect as possible. I give them 10 for effort and 6 for attention.

When I look at Microsoft and let's say the port of Forza Horizon 3 and 5, it's a night and day difference. I'm sure SONY will get better at porting with time. They're new to this PC business.
 

winjer

Gold Member
Have you tried it? I was sceptical at first but it works surprisingly well in Spider-Man and it Plague Tale. The only annoying part were the artefacts around some UI elements but it wasn't bad enough to stop me from using it. On my bigger OLED, with a controller in hand... if a game supports DLSS3 in the future, I'm enabling that sucker.

Regarding SONY ports. Yes, some of them are sub-par at first but SONY is truly putting the effort to add extra features and patch them until they as perfect as possible. I give them 10 for effort and 6 for attention.

When I look at Microsoft and let's say the port of Forza Horizon 3 and 5, it's a night and day difference. I'm sure SONY will get better at porting with time. They're new to this PC business.

Sony is new to the PC market. But Nixxes is not. In fact they are an expert on PC games.
Nixxes did the PC version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which has an implementation of RT, using BVH hardware acceleration. So they know how to use the hardware.
I'm really puzzled on why Nixxes didn't do a proper implementation of RT and a better job with the streaming system.
Was Sony in such a haste to put this port out, that they didn't gave Nixxes enough time?
 
What the hell you talking bout mane?
You can offload certain tasks designated for the cpu to other parts of the system on ps5 cause of standardized hardware since pc has a million configurations they can’t do that unless they make multiple versions of the game (and no one is gonna do that obviously)
 
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