PubG Lite Graphics Compared to Full and Mobile Versions

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
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Last week, PuBG's developers announced a free-to-play version of the popular battle Royale Game with significantly lower hardware requirements, in what was clearly an effort to compete with Fortnite's relatively modest system requirements. Seeing how the full version of PubG is notorious for being slow and unoptimized, to big question is what PubG corp sacrificed to get the game running on an Intel IGP or a GTX 660. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of videos of "PubG Lite" on the web, but I just found a pretty decent apples-to-apples comparison showing the graphical difference between the Steam version of PubG, PubG lite, and PubG mobile.

Check it out here.

As usual, unmute at your own peril.

To my eyes, it looks like they scaled the mobile version of PubG up to PC instead of toning down the current PC version, and like mobile PubG and Call of Duty's battle royale mode, the shaders seemingly bring the original game's color plate closer to Fortnite's.
 
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I never understood the "PubG doesn't run well" stuff. I've run it on a lot of different video cards from 750ti to 1080ti and never experienced any real issues.
 
I never understood the "PubG doesn't run well" stuff. I've run it on a lot of different video cards from 750ti to 1080ti and never experienced any real issues.
While "Doesn't run well" is a bit of a subjective thing, the textures, models, and animations are very simple and the draw distance relatively short (tall grass and what not) you need a disproportionately expensive hardware set compared to other titles to get upwards of 100 fps with decent settings, even on low settings unless you are running a 1080 and a higher end i5 or better you are going to struggle to get those 100+ fps numbers which are supposedly needed to be competitive. Meanwhile with that same hardware in a number of other titles you are crushing it and punching upwards of 100 with better looking graphics. Granted Bluehole has done a lot over the last year to improve things, that is a stigma to crawl past which will take effort on their side that I honestly haven't seen them put in as of yet.
 
I never understood the "PubG doesn't run well" stuff. I've run it on a lot of different video cards from 750ti to 1080ti and never experienced any real issues.
The frametimes are extremely inconsistent is the main issue. Even at decent framerates the game doesn't look smooth.
 
I never understood the "PubG doesn't run well" stuff. I've run it on a lot of different video cards from 750ti to 1080ti and never experienced any real issues.


Remember, your typical user is probably in India, trying to play it on a old laptop with Intel GMA4500 graphics :p
 
But does PUBG lite correct the incredibly horrid netcode the game has? Doubtful.
 
One of the problems with many large outdoor tactical shooters, and PUBG as well is draw distance and graphics inconsistencies. You may look like you are behind cover or hidden on your screen, but because of render distances that grass or those bushes are completely invisible on your opponents screen and you are completely exposed)

So, my thoughts on this are:

1.) Will "lite" players and standard players be dumped into the same games, or kept separate?

2.) Does this mean they will bring the standard game back up to the graphical fidelity it had during the early access phase of the game? It looked pretty good back then, but I logged on more recently and it looked like crap.

I wish more of these games would at least have an option to auto-match people based on similar graphics settings. With the player counts they have, this should be feasible, and it will make the games more fair, and reduce the urge of some to minimize all of their settings to get an edge.
 
While "Doesn't run well" is a bit of a subjective thing, the textures, models, and animations are very simple and the draw distance relatively short (tall grass and what not) you need a disproportionately expensive hardware set compared to other titles to get upwards of 100 fps with decent settings, even on low settings unless you are running a 1080 and a higher end i5 or better you are going to struggle to get those 100+ fps numbers which are supposedly needed to be competitive. Meanwhile with that same hardware in a number of other titles you are crushing it and punching upwards of 100 with better looking graphics. Granted Bluehole has done a lot over the last year to improve things, that is a stigma to crawl past which will take effort on their side that I honestly haven't seen them put in as of yet.

What is annoying is that to be on the same level, you need to run low on just about everything. It's always wonderful to be getting sniped at when you can't see the person because for them, not all the leaves are rendering because it's at a different render range. Or hey, lets hide in this bush, or prone in this grass....Only to stand out like a sore thumb because the person sniping is outside of it's render range and you are standing out in the open to them.
 
While "Doesn't run well" is a bit of a subjective thing, the textures, models, and animations are very simple and the draw distance relatively short (tall grass and what not) you need a disproportionately expensive hardware set compared to other titles to get upwards of 100 fps with decent settings, even on low settings unless you are running a 1080 and a higher end i5 or better you are going to struggle to get those 100+ fps numbers which are supposedly needed to be competitive. Meanwhile with that same hardware in a number of other titles you are crushing it and punching upwards of 100 with better looking graphics. Granted Bluehole has done a lot over the last year to improve things, that is a stigma to crawl past which will take effort on their side that I honestly haven't seen them put in as of yet.


Yeah, there is a reason tunnel shooters like the original Metro 2033 still look better today than even the newest large outdoor shooters. If you can control your render distances it drastically reduces the polygon counts and texture requirements on the GPU, and becomes a much simpler task.

Games with large outdoor environments will thus never look as good as indoor tunnel-shooters.
 
Yeah, there is a reason tunnel shooters like the original Metro 2033 still looks better today than even the newest large outdoor shooters. If you can control your render distances it drastically reduces the polygon counts and texture requirements on the GPU, and becomes a much simpler task.

Games with large outdoor environments will thus never look as good as indoor tunnel-shooters.
That is true, but then you have situations in PUBG where you are hiding in a bush or a tree or crouched in the grass but that guy you are sneaking up on just needs to take a few steps back and lower his draw distance and you are just out in a open field now. But my point is even with those drastically reduced polygon counts from the lower textures and what not, there are other open world games that have higher quality graphics and run better on lesser hardware.
 
The frametimes are extremely inconsistent is the main issue. Even at decent framerates the game doesn't look smooth.

Ya the game has horrible frame time and stutter issues even on the highest end tweaked systems with variable refresh rate. Maybe the "new" graphics will smooth it out.
 
That is true, but then you have situations in PUBG where you are hiding in a bush or a tree or crouched in the grass but that guy you are sneaking up on just needs to take a few steps back and lower his draw distance and you are just out in a open field now. But my point is even with those drastically reduced polygon counts from the lower textures and what not, there are other open world games that have higher quality graphics and run better on lesser hardware.


I'm curious, which are you referring to? I used to be a big fan of the Red Orchestra Franchise. It suffered from many of the same problems due to the large outdoor maps. Even the latest sequel, RO2 is aging now though, and no longer a relevant comparison, especially since it runs in the old Unreal 3 engine.

What are some good examples you are aware of that do the large outdoor environment well?
 
I never understood the "PubG doesn't run well" stuff. I've run it on a lot of different video cards from 750ti to 1080ti and never experienced any real issues.
Fortnite is playable on laptop with nvidia 660m (low settings). Could not get PubG to run playably on same laptop. Yes, I could upgrade my laptop, but I don't play enough games to warrant it.
 
I'm curious, which are you referring to? I used to be a big fan of the Red Orchestra Franchise. It suffered from many of the same problems due to the large outdoor maps. Even the latest sequel, RO2 is aging now though, and no longer a relevant comparison, especially since it runs in the old Unreal 3 engine.

What are some good examples you are aware of that do the large outdoor environment well?
Direct comparisons with similar(ish) map sizes would be CoD WWII, Battlefield 2 as they all released around the same time (not including Beta access), but you could use other older games in those franchises as good examples, even the RO titles if you wanted. Those games running on the lowest settings on the same hardware will both run better while looking better at the same or higher FPS's though be it with a much more limited support scope.

Bluehole has done a good job of getting the game on just about every system under the sun, but they need to clean their stuff up, the fact that they have to release a super low graphics edition to compete hardware wise with Fortnight which when you turn all the way down you can run cleanly on an overclocked toaster you picked up cheap at Walmart. Just look at how PUBG does AA, it does it on the CPU for all settings but ULTRA only then does it move it to GPU, most building renders are done on the CPU as well not the GPU which can lead to a number of strange performance issues that are pretty well documented in the Reddit threads.
 
Direct comparisons with similar(ish) map sizes would be CoD WWII, Battlefield 2 as they all released around the same time (not including Beta access), but you could use other older games in those franchises as good examples, even the RO titles if you wanted. Those games running on the lowest settings on the same hardware will both run better while looking better at the same or higher FPS's though be it with a much more limited support scope.

Bluehole has done a good job of getting the game on just about every system under the sun, but they need to clean their stuff up, the fact that they have to release a super low graphics edition to compete hardware wise with Fortnight which when you turn all the way down you can run cleanly on an overclocked toaster you picked up cheap at Walmart. Just look at how PUBG does AA, it does it on the CPU for all settings but ULTRA only then does it move it to GPU, most building renders are done on the CPU as well not the GPU which can lead to a number of strange performance issues that are pretty well documented in the Reddit threads.

Huh. Interesting. I haven't played seen a CoD or Battlefield game in ages. Last I did, the CoD maps were reminiscent of small CS maps. I didn't realize that they were larger now. Do they really have map sizes that compare in size to PUBG? I mean, that island is HUGE. You have render distances to the horizon in some spots.
 
Huh. Interesting. I haven't played seen a CoD or Battlefield game in ages. Last I did, the CoD maps were reminiscent of small CS maps. I didn't realize that they were larger now. Do they really have map sizes that compare in size to PUBG? I mean, that island is HUGE. You have render distances to the horizon in some spots.
The PUBG maps are massive much more so than the others but anything out of render distance is irrelevant for their performance problems, as their issues directly relate to how things are rendered and those other games could have larger maps should the developers choose while not adding any real performance changes. While PUBG does do a render to the horizon for a bunch of background objects at that distance any player or vehicle would and should be a tiny spec and wouldn't really consume much in the way of resources the real performance problems come as things get closer and thereby more intense, that is when most users will see their strange lag spikes and frame drops which is also when it is most frustrating, hence the anger and stigma around PUBG having shit performance.
 
So it is like a tweaked mobile version. Smart for developing countries. You can fault BlueHole for a lot of things, but they know how to get paid.
 
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