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Thoughts on "Demanding" Games (Die Shrink Telegrams) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-16 20:31:41
Edited:
2025-09-16 20:36:31
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Well, it seems Borderlands 4 freakout videos are the latest easy clickbait for talking head YouTubers - so let's talk about it! Although actually we are going to go beyond the clickbait and specifically talk about our thoughts on what it means for a game to be "demanding", "unoptimized", or hard to run for what you arguably get back in image quality.

It's not just Borderlands 4 btw - past games that come time mind with debates over their performance "being worth it" are Crysis, Minecraft, ARK, DayZ, Arkham Knight, and MANY more you could probably mention below! Let's talk about the past, present, and future of demanding games...and when it has been "worth it", and when it hasn't been. Plus yeah, we'll talk about Borderlands 4 some more.

You have ~20 hours (till around noon US Central Time on Wednesday) to write in below! Be respectful, be thoughtful, and be as concise as possible (no 5-Paragraph submissions) to have your submission considered for the show!

https://www.techspot.com/review/3033-borderlands-4-benchmark/

https://youtu.be/qa9RzK3T8IU?si=B1qfxxx27Yi8y_69

https://youtu.be/CMkukKv-C-E?si=aJgjLcl2F4x2b5Vr

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/borderlands-4-performance-benchmark/

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/borderlands-4-handheld-steam-deck-rog-ally-x-fps-performance-benchmark/7.html

Comments

FireDarkness39

While I understand that performance optimizations need to be made, the prevalence of TAA and non-regularized rendering has made many games look far less sharp than they have in the past. In particular, BF2042, while having great graphics, often looked blurrier than age-old games like CSGO. Why do some developers prefer more effects and higher-resolution textures over increasing taa rendering density to make their games look sharp?

Roman Matúš Labuš (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-05 20:00 I think that for the game industry to get healthier, developers need to be smarter. Battlefield 6 is a good example: it doesn’t need ray tracing. For the sake of stability and a broader user base, it can run without it.
2025-09-16 20:37

Lucas

I feel like this can be, at least in part, attributed to large, commercial game engines that try to be all things to all developers. Unreal in particular is used in film, construction and many other industries beyond gaming. Because of the needs of these radically different customers, it has a bunch of baggage to support their different use cases. Combine that with the message of "just code away and it will be fine, probably" and you end up with a load of games that run kind of rough, to poorly, to downright insultingly bad. Do you agree with this assessment and what fixes are there since there is no one culprit to go after? There have been both good and bad examples of custom engines, so everyone making their own tech again probably isn't the solution, on top of not being economical for the majority of projects.

FloridaMan

I don't have a problem with games demanding more out of PCs, even if we are hitting diminishing returns. The problem is that games aren't scaling well performance-wise down to medium like they used to, and I would argue there are some games where low appears broken like Black Myth Wukong. The inability to opt out of demanding features creates an unnecessarily high bar. Crysis is the antithesis of this where it could scale down quite well and still be functional. We need scalable games again

Gob

I understand wanting to be a part of the excitement of the launch of a new game in a franchise you like, but when are people going to stop buying games without looking at any reviews? I know that DF and NXG don’t do performance reviews of every game, but at this point I can’t sympathize with anyone who complains about this issue. People need to stop preordering games or buying them at launch sight unseen. There always have been and always will be demanding games or poorly optimized games. The difference is now we have more resources than ever to identify them.

PostRetroism

If a dev makes a game that doesn't run well (excluding frame generation) on an average card, they they shouldn't complain when gamers are upset.

Prior is the theme 999

We need more developer deep dives and tech explanations, after I saw “Grounded Making of the Last of us” on YouTube from naughty dog a decade ago now. I’ve looked at this topic differently it explains challenges they came across, why they did this, or why putting this bush two inches to the right killed performance in this area. Pushing the limits is fine but if the limits aren’t shown or explained, all people will say is “what’s so different about this one compared to the last but run worse”. Granted the deep dives will never be an excuse for poor performance, gaming is one of the few markets that has clear expectations. If that impacts your vision as a developer don’t be surprised and go on twitter tours explaining why everyone is wrong.

Jonathan Harris

While I myself have no problems with games demanding more; in fact one of my favorite things about PC gaming is that the more demanding the title is, the more replay value it has for me because I can go back with newer hardware and get updated fidelity. But there’s a limit. A 5090 shouldn’t have to render the game at 1080p plus use FG to target 60+ fps. Using BL4 as the example if it’s supposed to be fun playing with friends then maybe the visual acuity can be toned down so more people can enjoy the fun. If it’s supposed to be a visual set piece then choose an art style that conveys that. To me BL as a series visually looks the same since the Pre-Sequel so all the extra lighting and invisible polygon count is lost and unneeded if at the same time the best GPU money can buy is struggling.

Girthmaxxer

Some PC gamers seem to look down on demanding games that use ray tracing solely because their frame rate is lower compared to what it brings in image quality and pushing 3D graphics forward with more adaptable lighting models. Alan Wake 2 is an example of a demanding game that could be justified as it really pushes technology for incredible visual fidelity. It included path traced lighting, added mesh shaders for the first time in a game, and used extremely dense, high levels of geometry. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Doom: The Dark Ages were both built with the id Tech engine and are examples of path tracing that still performs well. There is also an expectation that you should be able to play at max settings with a high frame rate rather than allowing game graphics to scale with future hardware. Crysis was extremely difficult to run at Ultra settings when it released but more powerful hardware made it possible. This helped the game age visually better.

magneticmanul

Daniel Owen's video comparing image quality of Borderlands 4 vs Borderlands 3 when scaled to similar frame rates is the last nail in the coffin. Older games now look better AND run better than problematic new games, when using popular, recent hardware like RTX 4060 [Desktop.] Randy Pitchford says the budget was more than 2x the BL3 budget so one has to wonder where 6 years and all that money went. More studios need to make the hard decision to make a good game with old tools they know, rather than bad games with new tools that they clearly don't understand.

magneticmanul

Or in the case of RTX 5060, 4x MFG can enable 60Hz gaming!

Cleansweep

I feel like people would be more forgiving of demanding games if they were designed around just hitting 1080p 60FPS or better at medium on 60 class cards without frame gen or upscaling. That seems to be the modern floor of expectations and the specs tons of people have due to the past 5+ years of awful luck for PC gamers. Having insanely demanding requirements for ultra visuals at high resolutions is fine. But if developers can't get their games running well on hardware most people have/can actually get, they shouldn't be surprised that audiences get mad when most of them have a bad experience.

CompressedAIBlocks

This is a long one, just a warning. Tom and Dan, or The Boys as they're known here in Canada. This might be a hot take but I do not think any game* warrants the levels of performance we get. I feel software badly needs to catch up with hardware as well. I think relative to other games on the market none of these games are the levels of Crysis (2007) was over its peers. It took 5+ years for other games to start using the rendering techniques Crysis did consistently/commonly. Yes, it wasn't the best programmed either (looking at you CPU usage) but it was doing things you could 100% be like "Yup, this generation and two gens from now will still struggle with this". This type of performance seems to be happening *way* more commonly now, even on "mid" looking games. *I added this cause people will be like what about completely maxed out AW2 or CP2077. I agree these are good examples of being better than other titles but the poor performance we experience seems more common than not on games that don't even approach these two titles.

Cleansweep

How bad would the negative consequences for game developers and players be if recent/new AAA games being played on AMD's AT3/4 GPUs aren't able to hit 1080p+ 60+ FPS at medium settings?

Manuel Nascimento

Hello Tom and, I suspect, "least demanding guest" Dan! I was wondering about what your favourite games of all time were and why? And I am also wondering how the "optimisation" factor is in that evaluation and why. Cheers and keep your sanity and rationality alive for DECADES to come :)

Deadeyes

Problem is, if you really badly specifically want to play borderlands 4 you're kinda just stuck with it. Boycotting isn't going to help with performance.

Deadeyes

Unfortunately, many of these features are also designed to save a ton of development time and creating fall backs for them would balloon project costs. We are pulling off a terrible bandaid right now getting over the baseline needed performance for a lot of these technologies (examples like BL4 excluded, that game is exceptionally problematic). The nice thing is, the costs of a lot of these technologies is relatively flat. Turning it on is very expensive, but turning it UP is not. So once we get over the hump things should get better really quickly.

Deadeyes

RT usage must be evaluated on a case by case basis. Not a good fit for BF6 Great fit for Metro Exodus

AI Generated Brazilian Gamer

I think one of the definitions of an optimized game that better aligns with gamers wishes and expectations is the one defended by Daniel Owen and Digital Foundry (and its variants). In their terms, to make a game optimized is to make a game that has both a good visuals to performance cost ratio and a good scalability between low end and high end systems. In other words, nowadays it isn't enough to just have an absolutely beautiful game that runs like trash on low end systems. It has to have a good enough performance to visual ratio across all the configurations from the low end to the high end to be considered well optimized. Aside from their CEO being way to active on social media, this is why I think BL4 is getting this much bad cover: it is just way to easy to compared it to games like CP2077 that are prettier AND run better at low end PCs. BL4 is ugly at low settings and way too demanding at max settings —although I would argue it looks and runs okay at the mid end. I didn't see many people saying borderlands looked bad, just that it ran bad compared to what it looked like. And I think that this is precisely the problem with many UE5 games. They look okay, it's just that they usually have a bad perf to looks ratio. My question to you guys is: do you think UE5 will ever change it's bad reputation of being a platform of unoptimized games, or are their problems just generally too deeply rooted to be taken care of? And also, does epic even care?

BespokeEP

Game budgets will always increase because devs salaries will keep increasing, the lease for the studio space goes up in price, utility bills go up.. etc. A games budget typically consists of: 1. Developer salaries, including outsourcing 2. Operating the studio, including: utilities, lease or property tax, new equipment, snacks, drinks, etc. 3. Actors salaries 4. Composer or music licensing fees Some modern games do more like Ninja Theory had every outfit in the game hand made, but 90% of modern AAA that is what the budget consists of, developer salaries being the biggest portion, which is why there are always layoffs.

Billy Mays

Hello Tom and Dan. I’m totally fine If a game at max settings with noticeable payoff is hard to run. Pushing visuals, number of npcs, physics etc. shouldn’t be discouraged even if it’s demanding on hardware. I think too many people test games at max settings only and when performance isn’t great they declare the game unoptimized. With that said a problem arises when the settings are turned down and the performance hardly changes yet the fidelity certainly does. Having performance changes reasonably scale with visual changes would solve most gripes IMO.

Fred Fredburger

To point out something that I don't believe was well brought up is that the dev cycle for Borderlands 4 was 6 years. Think about how dramatically hardware expectations have changed from 2019, or even 2022. If I told you in 2022 that the 5060 was going to just barely beat a 3060TI and still only have 8GB of vram in 2025, would you believe that? Couple that with the idea that 60FPS being the standard, the bare minimum of "playable" in recent years, and I think you can understand why some things just simply didn't pan out.

Tyler Lederer

So I initially purchased BL4 on the PS5 Pro and had very little issues. Memory leak after a couple hours of play and sometimes when there were over a dozen enemies shooting and explosions going off did the FPS drop into the 50s. Otherwise the game ran at 60FPS looking crisp and sharp. I then purchased the game on PC (Linux Mint) with a 6800XT/5800X3D and it was a night and day difference. On PC I had to use either FSR or TSR at balanced with medium settings to get the FPS around 50. At medium settings the game is not crisp or sharp looking. I think that's why some people are saying this game looks like BL3. It's unfortunate but the PC version doesn't do this game any justice. In this instance I'd say it's worth it on the PS5 Pro (can't speak for base PS5) and not worth it on PC ATM. A PS5 Pro patch would be great though. I think creating a demanding game is acceptable when there is so much more being added that it outweighs the hit to performance. Crysis is a good example where that team was using so many features and tech for the time that it was justifiable for its performance. Monster Hunter Wilds' performance issues aren't justified for some extra details and textures on models for the lack of content in the game at launch. Elden Ring is an example of a game being unoptimized but Fromsoft put so much stuff into it that it didn't matter for a majority of the people. Even though Cyberpunk 2077 is in a pretty good state right now. I'd argue overall it wasn't worth it for the game to be so demanding unoptimized. It's taken many patches and years to get the game to where it is now. That second DLC probably would have been out by now along with different patches coming out since the game would have been in a pretty good state at launch. Still going to dive into the Witcher 4 when it releases though! I can't say the same about Elder Scrolls 6 after the mess that was Starfield.

Shifting Pixel

I think UE5 shows pretty well that you can´t quite put resolutions and framerates onto graphics cards and consoles. The 4k60 dream of current gen consoles gets more like a 540p 45fps blur in some games´s most demanding scenes. Should devs focus more on 1080p 60fps at medium settings as a basline for consoles and equivalent graphics cards with optional upscaling and frame-gen on more high end hardware? With the release of the new Xboxes UE5 is probably becoming quite a desaster.

Prior is the theme 999

Arkham knights launch and borderlands 4 launch aren’t the same just because they both launched with poor performance on pc. One was a cheap product outsourced vs an in house made product from the developer themselves.

Chris Rijk

As consumers it is in our own best interest to discourage games from being rushed out in a flawed state. If you do decide to pre-order then make sure you can get a full refund and be fully prepared to use that option. Otherwise wait for reviews as there is no need to punish yourself by playing a flawed game. Leaving a review or rating helps as well. If developers and publishers expect to take a big financial hit for releasing a game too early then they’ll either stop or go out of business. But when pointing out the flaws of a particular game I think it is helpful to give examples of games that have been good on release. With that in mind, what games impressed you the most on release in terms of both their visuals and their performance?