? The "Farce" of 2025: What happened to optimization?

[_Neptunno_]

Hello everyone!!

After seeing the best optimized games of last year, I read the article on DSOGaming where they show the other side of the coin: the technical disasters of 2025. The truth is that seeing some cases, you want to cry, especially considering the hardware we handle today

Here I leave you the selection of those that have been crowned as the worst optimized of 2025:

Rise of the Ronin: We start strong. A game that graphically does not justify its requirements and that in ultra quality drags inexplicably. It seems that the jump to PC caught them off guard.

Double Fine’s Keeper: The terror of GPUs. Not even an RTX 5090 (yes, you read that right) is capable of maintaining stable 60 FPS at native 4K. Unreal Engine 5 has gotten out of hand.

The Outer Worlds 2: A disaster for CPUs. It only saturates 4 threads, so if you don’t have a processor with an IPC from another planet, forget about playing with Ray Tracing. It doesn’t scale well in multi-core.

Monster Hunter Wilds & Borderlands 4: Two heavyweights that arrived "broken". Monster Hunter has needed half a life in patches to be playable, and Borderlands continues to have a performance that is impossible to grasp.

Oblivion Remastered: The one that takes the big prize. A total disaster that seems Bethesda has left to its fate. It continues to work terribly months after the launch.

Special mention for Vampire: Bloodlines 2, which in addition to performing poorly, has brought the worst case of stuttering (jerking) that I have seen in years. It is frustrating to see how they release unfinished games trusting that DLSS or FSR will solve our problems.

Of all the ones I see, the one that hurts me the most is Oblivion Remastered. It is one of those classics that I have been pending to play seriously (yes, I tried it in its day and it is amazing despite the years it has), but it is a real shame how they have wasted such an opportunity to bring a myth with all the current improvements. It seems that they launched it and left it abandoned to its fate... a shame.

Unfortunately, many remasters run the same fate today; fortunately, some are saved and better work is noticed (within the limitations, of course), like the classic Tomb Raiders, otherwise, we would be in trouble.

Source inspired in: DSOGaming - Worst Optimized PC Games of 2025.

Regards.

[pos_yo]

Completely agree... And people blame Unreal Engine 5 as if it were the only cause. What is a demanding engine? Yes, and a lot. But we can also see gems like Expedition 33 or Black Myth: Wukong that play wonderfully even on a Steam Deck. Obviously they are demanding games if you want to play at maximum but let's start to open the can of worms that playing in Ultra is totally unnecessary. In my experience I will say that last year I made the jump from a RX6600XT to a RX9070 but I stayed close to a year with the RX6600XT and a 1440p monitor and I could play perfectly in that resolution even being a 1080p card from 3 generations ago. Obviously I had to upscale and lower graphics, I had to take a while to configure the graphic options to leave it totally optimal for playing but that's how I played The Last of Us 2 on that card and I enjoyed it a lot in medium graphics and upscaling with FSR in quality.

[cobito]

This happens with all software in general. For me, one of the most blatant examples (it's not a game), is Slack. I don't know how it is now, but when I used it back in 2019, it was just a group chat with some extra functions (nothing special). The program is made with Electron which, in essence, is Chrome on which web applications run. Slack consumed around that time 1-2 GB of RAM. This program has a similar functionality to mIRC (with some extras, a current interface, more secure, etc). And mIRC ran quite smoothly on a 486 at 66 MHz with 8MB of RAM.

I can understand that modernizing a program implies an increase in resource use, but going from running with 8 (including system) to needing thousands (only the program), is out of place. That is if you count that with a multiprocessor system at thousands of megahertz, sometimes it doesn't go too smoothly.

And well, then there are absolute ridiculous things like Office 365 and Windows 11, but I don't get into that or the demons get out of me.

In games, the issue is not as immediate because, unlike generalist software, complexity has not stopped increasing since the beginning of time. It's absurd to say that a shooter game like Far Cry 7 should be able to run on a machine a little more powerful than a shooter game like Doom. But I'm totally sure that the hardware it will require will be indecent. Or maybe I'm wrong given the hardware crisis we're going through.

All this in the end is a purely financial issue. On the one hand, people seem willing to spend many hundreds of euros periodically on having hardware that moves these monstrosities (more so given that GPUs, in addition to having reached astronomical prices in the mid-range, are one of the few things that continue to evolve at a good pace). On the other hand, in development it is several orders of magnitude cheaper to use things like Electron than to have to develop a custom framework or game engine from scratch, which would be the most efficient option.

To this day there are still examples of efficiency in development. I come up with 7-Zip and Notepad++, both made without using third-party frameworks, which makes it extremely difficult to port those programs to other systems, but they have their own consumption from the late 90s, which is what is expected in software that offers precisely a functionality similar to what programs from the late 90s offered.

In games, I'm a bit out of the loop, but being an almost purely commercial field and where free software is residual, it must be even worse since the money rules over everything else.

[_Neptunno_]

What a good reflection, @cobito, I agree with you point by point, really.

I'm also a fan of 7-Zip and Notepad++. They are lightweight, effective and even though years pass, you don't see or notice them being outdated. That said, there was a bit of a mess with Notepad++ not too long ago because of a vulnerability that was pretty serious, but considering the cost of the program, we can't really be mad.
However, with Windows 11... sometimes you just want to pull out a katana. I'm a convinced user of "the old" Windows, but every day they damage my trust more with so many "crazy" updates.
I have the feeling that their QA team is either not paid well or on an indefinite vacation... joe.

And with games... there's not much more to add. I can understand (and even get excited) that a title like GTA VI needs 6 or 8 cores to see its full potential... even that it asks for 32 GB of RAM, 16 GB of VRAM or that it weighs 250 GB (which would already be crazy), but those are the typical games that 'have the license' to ask for that for what they offer.

But please! That a simple remaster or a port goes worse than the original from that era, where the CPUs were Core of 1st or 2nd generation... or even older... there's no way to understand it.

@pos_yo great that 6600X!! Definitely on par with the legendary RTX 3060TI, very good GPUs especially for 1080p. They can still hold their own well today for people on a budget

Regards!!

[krampak]

@_Neptunno_ said in The "Blunders" of 2025: What has happened with optimization?:

but every day they damage my confidence more with so many "crazy" updates.

We have more and more problems every day due to Windows Update updates. It's not just because things break overnight after an update (we have an export/transformation to Word that stopped working a long time ago because of an Office update) but suddenly the machines start doing strange things, going slow, having inexplicable errors and it's because of pending updates. It's about installing the damn updates, restarting and everything is fine.

[_Neptunno_]

@krampak I just hate the damn updates. What a happiness when with Windows XP and Windows 7 you could really disable them!

Yes, I know that for security reasons it is important to be up to date, but I have the feeling that we live in a world of crazy people where there are only constant patches: Windows, Android, Steam, PS5... oh my god. That meme of having only 15 or 30 minutes to play and spending them looking at a progress bar is pure reality, it's not funny because it's true jajaja.

More than once it has happened to me: you sit down for that free time and you can't play a game because of some of these stories. And the worst thing is that it looks like, as things are done wrong and quickly, then the rush with the patches comes. That is, the mentality of today: why release the program well the first time, if we will already fix it later with a 20GB update

Greetings!!

[cobito]

Since you're talking about updates, I'll give my opinion.

Apart from the fact that the current software, whatever it may be, is painfully optimized, the overall quality has plummeted. And I have two theories (unproven).

The first is the Internet era. Before the Internet became popular (in the early 2000s in Spain), developers had to be very careful about what they published, because what came out was the definitive final version. Sending an update was expensive. I remember that with some popular games, updates were distributed on the CDROMs of magazines. That meant that few had access and not all distributors could afford to have that channel. That is, it was something exceptional.

Since the Internet allows any program to be updated, at any time and with files of any size, it has become very common to publish alpha versions directly. You see real garbage with serious malfunctions and performance issues. And the worst part is that it seems that this practice is quite accepted nowadays. You install anything that fails at the slightest or has poor performance and you think "well, they will publish a patch". And not only that, but the publication of patches itself has become a mass event in some cases waiting for such and such a fix or performance improvement announced by the public relations team of the moment. The versionitis that some call it.

The second theory is the AI era. I believe that the ridiculousness that Microsoft has been doing lately with Windows 11 updates is related to this. As I see the panorama, I have the feeling that the use of AI to generate code that is then not reviewed is starting to become generalized. And being Microsoft with its Copilot, I wouldn't be surprised that this practice (the one of using AI even in soup, not the one of not reviewing the resulting code), has become a company policy.

So now we are in the perfect storm: developers/distributors are not afraid to publish deficient software due to how cheap it is to send patches. And on the other hand, a new development paradigm for which no one has been trained and for which no one has prior experience, is being exploited on a large scale and without control.

The AI issue will be solved over time. But the issue of releasing test versions and already publishing patches will be here to stay.

[Yorus]

To be honest, I can't talk much about games, as I rarely play old stuff. But the topic of Windows 11 is something I deal with continuously at work. The latest issue is that on some of our Surfaces, normal USBs (not the USB-C Thunderbolt) have stopped working, along with associated devices like webcam and bluetooth. All users say it happened after an update, and I haven't found a quick solution yet because when you try to uninstall the update, it gets reversed. After several repairs, installations, reboots... it works again, but it takes precious time. So, between Surface and Windows 11, we have the perfect storm.

And you know there have been other issues, like problems with printers or audio after some updates. At home, it works well for me, but I only use it on the gaming computer; for more typical tasks, I use a mini PC with Linux Mint.