Best optimized games list for the PC

[biggles]

Hiya folks,
I've recently realized how much I enjoy pc games that have been well optimized. It makes me feel like pc gaming is a good investment. Conversely, I feel like I've been ripped off when I play pc games that run poorly even with lots of powerful hardware.

Anyway, since I just upgraded the pc, I'd like to pickup more games that are well optimized. 2 games I played recently with excellent optimization are GRID and Burnout Paradise (demo). Also, even though it's a bit older, I found Half-Life 2 and its expansions to run great and look pretty good.

What is your list of best optimized games for the PC?

 

[NotJay]

tf2

 

[shansoft]

tf2

that is so not true..

 

[MartinX]

Fallout 3.

Being a slightly older PC focused engine ported backwards to work on consoles seems to have resulted in some pretty tight optimization.

 

[XboxodX]

Fallout 3.

Being a slightly older PC focused engine ported backwards to work on consoles seems to have resulted in some pretty tight optimization.

I would disagree. While its performance is pretty good, it is the buggiest game I have ever owned in recent history (2 - 5 years).

 

[Zero82z]

Unreal Engine 3 games.

 

[zamardii]

Source Engine Games, and games using the Doom 3 engine like Prey, Doom 3 on ultra settings, Quake 4...

Also, I have Splinter Cell Chaos Theory which looks great on highest settings.

Oh yeah, and Painkiller and it's expansion Battle out of Hell looks great and are really well optimized.

 

[SoFGR]

My definition of optimized : wide scaleability with the hardware available AT THE TIME of game's release, not many "future hardware" graphics settings


Chronicles of Riddick espace from butcher bay
Max Payne 1&2
Infernal
Serious Sam series
L4D
HL2 & CSS ( altho the latter became a cpu hungry monster update after update )
COD4
FEAR2
GTA vice city & san andreas ( NOT 3 )
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
Prey
Painkiller

 

[Sly]

HL2 was buggy as hell at the time of game's release, and took a ton of patches that are collectively bigger than the original game to fix.

 

[TheBlueChanell]

TF2 is pretty well optimized especially with the multi-core patch, I've experienced smoother gameplay and less bugs/crashing but then again ymmv.

I would also say DMC4 is a very well optimized game. It looks and runs beautifully even in DX10. Capcom has done a very good job with their PC Ports, because they don't feel like shitty console ports.

The UT3 engine also runs very well for how good it looks, it's in my opinion, one of the best looking engines out there.

 

[FatFed]

Call of Duty 2/4/5, MoH: AA, Titan Quest, Far Cry 2, Sins of a Solar Empire are a few off the top of my head.

 

[Sabrewulf...]

I would disagree. While its performance is pretty good, it is the buggiest game I have ever owned in recent history (2 - 5 years).

I'll second that, what a p.o.s., I'm still waiting for them to properly patch it up without breaking more stuff.

Got the game in Dec. and quite playing when patch 1.1 came out and fucked up vats.


As for the topic:

I just installed Dead Space last night and am very impressed with it so far, looks damn good and runs great maxed @ 1856x1392 (21" CRT) on my 4870 and it has zero patches! No true AA though which kinda sucks, but the lighting & sound in that game are fabulous.

 

[tuaarita]

Flatout 2, I used to run it maxed on a Duron @ 1.8Ghz, Radeon 9600 Pro and 768mb ddr333 I think the resolution was 1024x768 tho.

I would also say DMC4 is a very well optimized game. It looks and runs beautifully even in DX10. Capcom has done a very good job with their PC Ports, because they don't feel like shitty console ports.

The controls are pretty crap, it's almost impossible to play with a keyboard atleast to me. But it runs well.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

The word optimized is just flat out not understood correctly by almost everyone, this is a perfect example

My definition of optimized : wide scaleability with the hardware available AT THE TIME of game's release, not many "future hardware" graphics settings

It all comes down to epeen hurt, so many people QQ over games they cannot run in "max setting", there's this fabled max settings craze and a lot of people think that the game looks crap unless it's in max settings, they think that just because they pimp out their rigs with SLI or crossfire or the latest video card that they're somehow entitled to run every game in max settings.

Optimization is simply making sure the game engine provides a level of quality which could not be provided faster any other way. High settings require high amounts of rendering power to run, it does NOT mean it's unoptimized just because it runs slowly.

People banged on for ages that Crysis was unopitmized but in the end no one has provided that level of graphical complexity and fidelity on them scales and have it run better, so theres no reason so far to believe that it is unoptimized.

If what you mean is that you want a game that runs well on your hardware then SAY SO, don't dance around the fact that you have a slow PC by asking for optimized games. Most modern games are reasonably well optimized on release because most optimization takes place in the engine itself with dynamic occlusion, it's not like back in the day where it was down to the mappers to occlude their maps by hand, its done per pixel now.

 

[Sabrewulf...]

The word optimized is just flat out not understood correctly by almost everyone, this is a perfect example



It all comes down to epeen hurt, so many people QQ over games they cannot run in "max setting", there's this fabled max settings craze and a lot of people think that the game looks crap unless it's in max settings, they think that just because they pimp out their rigs with SLI or crossfire or the latest video card that they're somehow entitled to run every game in max settings.

Optimization is simply making sure the game engine provides a level of quality which could not be provided faster any other way. High settings require high amounts of rendering power to run, it does NOT mean it's unoptimized just because it runs slowly.

People banged on for ages that Crysis was unopitmized but in the end no one has provided that level of graphical complexity and fidelity on them scales and have it run better, so theres no reason so far to believe that it is unoptimized.

If what you mean is that you want a game that runs well on your hardware then SAY SO, don't dance around the fact that you have a slow PC by asking for optimized games. Most modern games are reasonably well optimized on release because most optimization takes place in the engine itself with dynamic occlusion, it's not like back in the day where it was down to the mappers to occlude their maps by hand, its done per pixel now.

Take a hike Princess...

 

[Frraksurred]

Now, now. I have to half agree with Princess. A lot of people do color their hardware descriptions out of fear of seeming less [H]. Not everyone has the luxury of getting crazy with their setups. There is no shame in living within your means and still wanting to enjoy a reasonable number of games.

That said, the crowd you'll find at [H] is rarely interested in anything less then max settings. You're kind of at the PC's "go big or go home" corner of the world. While we're all for optimized code, if you're looking to take a petition to make games less demanding, you're probably in the wrong place.

 

[Redshirt #24]

And that, Frraksurred, may be the nicest and sanest post we're going to get in this thread. You diplomat, you!

 

[Frraksurred]

LOL! I do try.

 

[TheBlueChanell]

Flatout 2, I used to run it maxed on a Duron @ 1.8Ghz, Radeon 9600 Pro and 768mb ddr333 I think the resolution was 1024x768 tho.



The controls are pretty crap, it's almost impossible to play with a keyboard atleast to me. But it runs well.

why would you want to use a keyboard and mouse for DMC. Just because you play it on PC doesn't mean it's played best with mouse/kb.

Get a wired 360 controller for games like that, it won't hurt your pc e-penis...I promise.

 

[Zinn]

Unreal Tournament 3
Far Cry 2
Spore (like it or hate it, but it runs on integrated gfx)
Left 4 Dead

All of these games run great on older hardware, or maxed out on my GTS 250 at the office. So I'd say they're pretty well optimized.

 

[xuerebx]

I would disagree. While its performance is pretty good, it is the buggiest game I have ever owned in recent history (2 - 5 years).

While FO3 was nothing special, it certainly was not buggy for me. Although I've read a lot of complaints on the Beth forums about the game being buggy. I guess I'm lucky, but I did not encounter any bugs what so ever, and could play it at the highest graphical settings possible without causing any slowdowns (and my PC is 5 years old, though upgraded in some areas). I guess it depends on the user.

 

[Riftsaw]

Devil May Cry 4.

 

[SoFGR]

Actually princess frosty is right, but the current situation is a lot more complicated this time, things were a lot simpler back in the day, no SLI no Crossfire no monitors with big "native" resolutions ( one of the reasons i still game on crt ) no multicore cpus, most ppl back then didn't even know how to enable AA not even its purpose.

Now we see the same type of people spending thousands of dollars to run crysis at 1920*1200 maxed out with 8x AA so they can get that desirable e-pennis enlargment PF's talking about, I've been acting like that too when i was a 13yr old child, bitching about how my GF3 couldn't handle more than 2x /quincunx AA in max payne without lowering the detail settings first, but as time passed by, the more i got into playing FPSs online the less i cared about eye candy, (Q3/QL is a very good example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lez8wWx0g5w&NR=1 ) heck it's been 8 years since the first time I played CS and I still see myself joining mixed 5on5s from time to time.

Anyway, forgot to include DMC4 kai dead space on the list, really good examples of engine optimization ( in MY terms not PF's )

 

[SouLXIV]

fear 2 ran really well for me

 

[biggles]

I just remembered another game that run very well even on my old 8800gt rig...nba 2k9. I only played the demo but it ran great and looked real nice.

Also, somebody mentioned unreal 3 engine games. But I did not see great results running Rainbow Six Vegas on either my old (8800gt, e6400 cpu) or new (core i7 920, 4890) pc. Also, Mass Effect ran OK, not great on my old pc (haven't tested it on new machine yet). On the other hand, Unreal Tournament 3 runs well as does Bioshock.

 

[XboxodX]

While FO3 was nothing special, it certainly was not buggy for me. Although I've read a lot of complaints on the Beth forums about the game being buggy. I guess I'm lucky, but I did not encounter any bugs what so ever, and could play it at the highest graphical settings possible without causing any slowdowns (and my PC is 5 years old, though upgraded in some areas). I guess it depends on the user.

It was the same thing for me when I first got the game. I experienced very little crashes and good performance. But 6 months later when I went to start playing again, I can barely get through 20 minutes without it hardlocking and me having to end the process. I also cannot exit the game without manually ending the process. FO3 is a fun game, but the crashing and locking drive me absolutely bat shit crazy, especially when it hardlocks and I haven't saved in a while.

 

[zsec]

Fallout 3 looked real good on my Barton core Athlon at 2.1 ghz, 1.5 gig ram, and Radeon x1600. The only different I've noticed between that old PC and my new one is that draw distance and higher and constant FPS. Oblivion also looked real good on that machine, low draw distances aside.

 

[Proxy]

Unreal Tournament 3
Far Cry 2
Spore (like it or hate it, but it runs on integrated gfx)
Left 4 Dead

All of these games run great on older hardware, or maxed out on my GTS 250 at the office. So I'd say they're pretty well optimized.

I disagree with UT3, but everything else yes. Also just to toss on the list the original Call Of Duty was nice. At the time of its release it was killing video cards with its engine. UT2K4 was also nice, and still is.

My list would be:

SS Series
Quake Series
Doom 3
HL Series
BF2 (now)
Prey
Cod/Cod4
RTCW
Painkiller + Battle out of hell
Original F.E.A.R.
UT2k4

 

[Frraksurred]

Now we see the same type of people spending thousands of dollars to run crysis at 1920*1200 maxed out with 8x AA so they can get that desirable e-pennis enlargment...

So are you saying everyone who spends thousands on their systems to get the absolute maximum out of them is motivated by their online image?

I don't think that's it for most of us. I'd be afraid to add up what I've put into my system, and I've certainly got pictures online detailing most of it but that's not why I post them. Most guys gravitate towards electronics and/or anything related to horsepower, be it naturally aspirated or line conditioned. I personally spent a few years selling HDTV's and came away from it with pretty high standards. Not to mention trying to find another live person to talk about this stuff with seems about impossible unless you live in Silicon Valley. I come here because it's one of the few places I can share my sickness without people looking at me like I have transformers crawling around my head. Now does that mean I don't enjoy a compliment on my setup, lol... hardly. I put a lot of work and money into that thing!

 

[Everett1]

Aside from Fear 2, I found Battlefield 2142 also ran great on my P4/6800 machine.

 

[MetalX]

Source games.

 

[singe_101]

HL2 makes a city look gorgeous but it is a bleak city
The many jungle games make pretty things look good but I dunno.
UT3 is exquisite. You're basically dropped into the biggest budget sci-fi blockbuster, where aliens invade and the robots simultaneously turn on humans. And the rebels rebel. Or fight through Asian fortresses, it's up to you.
FEAR 2 looked really good
RTS games are doing pretty well
Prey rocks but it has to stretch or something

I kind of like simplicity so HL2 is great, not 150 things on the screen every frame. I haven't tried the HD mod.

There's a warehouse shooting gallery that I really like.

 

[Tudz]

People banged on for ages that Crysis was unopitmized but in the end no one has provided that level of graphical complexity and fidelity on them scales and have it run better, so theres no reason so far to believe that it is unoptimized.

For it to run smoothly you have to lower its graphics to a point where it looks like crap. By the time you're getting 40+fps on most mid range systems, textures look muddy, you've had to turn down shaders so everything looks flat and plain, the distant textures look like a murky bowl of soup (similar to Oblivion before texture mods), and pop-in is horrible and extremely noticable. Even when you're stationary you can see the pop in bubbles.

Even with all that you're not guaranteed a smooth experience. Sure, Crysis looks awesome maxed out, and you can't comment on how well optimised it is for top end systems because no other game has that level of detail close up but also a long draw distance. But you surely can't say its optimised for your mid-range PCs when it looks like arse on them. Sure you can run at 20fps and it may be passable because of motion blur, but its still noticable you're running at low fps and if you want a smooth experience you have to have more like 30-40fps minimum.

Anyway, my votes for optimised games...
Fallout 3 - I never had any of the bugs people previously have talked about, and I thought it looked pretty nice on my 8800GTS system with good performance.
UT3 - Looked good and ran smooth
COD4 - More so for its scaling. I could play against my 2 friends online, one had a 6800GT and the other a 4870, and me on my 8800GTS, but it still looked good even though it worked over a large range of hardware.

 

[phide]

Unreal Engine 3 games.

Yeah, or at least most of them. BioShock and UT3 run fantastically well. In fact, having played a great deal of UT3 today, I can honestly say it's the most efficiently designed game I've played in the past five years or so. The Rainbow Six games don't seem to fare as well.

As for Crysis, the thing you have to realize about Crysis is that a good deal of the performance is going into the shadowing. Even with deferred shading, that level of computational complexity for rendering shadows for nearly every object every frame is pretty tremendous. Factor in the high level of geometric complexity and the various complex shaders, and that's where your performance is going.

If you told Epic or id to render Crysis scenery in their respective platforms, I'm not entirely sure it'd be any faster than what Crytek and NVIDIA managed with CryEngine 2.

 

[Zero82z]

Yeah, or at least most of them. BioShock and UT3 run fantastically well. In fact, having played a great deal of UT3 today, I can honestly say it's the most efficiently designed game I've played in the past five years or so. The Rainbow Six games don't seem to fare as well.

It seems to me that UE3 makes use of a lot of tricks like shaders and normal/specular maps to simulate the look of effects that would be more demanding to calculate on the fly, like complex dynamic lighting. That probably plays a big part in how well the games run while still looking really good (some of the more notable UT3 maps really look spectacular).

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Now, now. I have to half agree with Princess. A lot of people do color their hardware descriptions out of fear of seeming less [H]. Not everyone has the luxury of getting crazy with their setups. There is no shame in living within your means and still wanting to enjoy a reasonable number of games.

That said, the crowd you'll find at [H] is rarely interested in anything less then max settings. You're kind of at the PC's "go big or go home" corner of the world. While we're all for optimized code, if you're looking to take a petition to make games less demanding, you're probably in the wrong place.

I wasn't trying to be all [H] elite, I've owned all manner of systems from slow ones to very fast ones over the years, so I've been on all respective sides of the fence.

It's more of a general observation and it occurs more with the high end system owners, they spend loads on their rig and feel entitled to fast frame rates and when a game can't be run in max settings all of a sudden that game is unoptimized.

I'm just being finiky really, the word optimization has a very specific meaning when it comes to code/graphics and has always been a hot topic.

Actually princess frosty is right, but the current situation is a lot more complicated this time, things were a lot simpler back in the day, no SLI no Crossfire no monitors with big "native" resolutions ( one of the reasons i still game on crt ) no multicore cpus, most ppl back then didn't even know how to enable AA not even its purpose.

Remember that SLI and crossfire are not officially supported technologies through DirectX, theres no real standard for it which the game developers can stick to, it's actually Nvidia and ATIs responsibility to make their unique technology work with the various games, hence the way it was ment to be played type initiatives.

So are you saying everyone who spends thousands on their systems to get the absolute maximum out of them is motivated by their online image?

I wouldn't say that, although it maybe a factor, as much as we joke about epeen it does exist and people do like showing off their kit. People who've spent a lot of money and can't run games in max.

For it to run smoothly you have to lower its graphics to a point where it looks like crap. By the time you're getting 40+fps on most mid range systems, textures look muddy, you've had to turn down shaders so everything looks flat and plain, the distant textures look like a murky bowl of soup (similar to Oblivion before texture mods), and pop-in is horrible and extremely noticable. Even when you're stationary you can see the pop in bubbles.

Even with all that you're not guaranteed a smooth experience. Sure, Crysis looks awesome maxed out, and you can't comment on how well optimised it is for top end systems because no other game has that level of detail close up but also a long draw distance. But you surely can't say its optimised for your mid-range PCs when it looks like arse on them. Sure you can run at 20fps and it may be passable because of motion blur, but its still noticable you're running at low fps and if you want a smooth experience you have to have more like 30-40fps minimum.

Crysis is a demanding game, so far I have no reason to believe its particuarly unoptimized, obviously there maybe a few small improvements to be made but there always are in all games.

At the end of the day if something runs slowly on medium range hardware thats not good, I aknowledge lots of people had speed issues with this game, but is that because of it being unoptimized? I dunno, I don't see any reason to think that straight off the bat, I mean the technology involved in a lot of the game was incredibly impressive at the time.

I would agree that Crysis was ahead of its time, almost inappropriately so, which probably didnt help sales. But thats not the same as being unoptimized, unoptimized code has some very specific traits, it can be re-engineed to run faster without effecting the quality of the output. The thing is, no one has ever provided any solid proof to back up statements of lack of optimization, like hey this shader does xyz and has execution time abc but we could half the amount of code here and get identical results. No one has provided a game with similar fidelity of lighting/shadows and physics on that scale which runs better than Crysis does. From my personal findings all unoptimized QQ has been baseless so far, unless someone can step up with some specifics?

 

[mastercheeze]

From my personal findings all unoptimized QQ has been baseless so far, unless someone can step up with some specifics?

I asked for that months and months ago, and never got anything. I chalked it up to epeen frustration and a ready excuse to pirate. Sad that it doesn't take much, one person says its "unoptimized piece of shite" and then it's off to the races. Edit: I forgot to add, take a look at Warhead - supposedly "optimized" and it looks like shit. I much prefer the original Crysis, tyvm.

It's the same thing with GTA IV.

 

[pfunkman]

minesweeper

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I asked for that months and months ago, and never got anything. I chalked it up to epeen frustration and a ready excuse to pirate. Sad that it doesn't take much, one person says its "unoptimized piece of shite" and then it's off to the races. Edit: I forgot to add, take a look at Warhead - supposedly "optimized" and it looks like shit. I much prefer the original Crysis, tyvm.

It's the same thing with GTA IV.

Yeah my experience exactly.

GTA IV was a bit more unique in that it was largely CPU bound, If i had to guess I'd say it was the physics engine and AI that really dragged it down, again it's hard to say if it could be optimized significantly without decreasing the quality of the output. It being CPU bottlenecked only added to the frustrations since increasing rendering power often didn't help.

 

[Frraksurred]

minesweeper

I dunno, FRAPS shows a frame rate drop when I force AA.