Last year was a disaster for PC games – here's how things need to change
2022 was a rough year for PC ports. Between stuttering performance issues and infuriating user experience problems, I was almost broken as a reviewer for Digital Foundry. To start the year with a fresh slate, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a checklist of sorts for best practises in creating a PC port. In generating this list of dos and don’ts, I’ve called on my experience reviewing hundreds of titles across my four years at Digital Foundry.
The list is definitely not exhaustive as I am trying to focus on the important core aspects of a PC port. There are plenty of other best practises I can suggest beyond this – no launchers from within launchers, for example. No sign-ins to other online platforms to launch a game on Steam would be another. I’d also like to see some kind of industry-wide standardisation in presenting recommended specs that actually informs the prospective buyer of the kind of system they’ll need to run the game well – the current system is meaningless without the context of resolution and performance expectations. Clearly, there’s a lot to address – but my focus here is simply in delivering a strong, competent PC port.
Some of my suggestions are more technically rigorous, others are low hanging fruit: but most importantly all of them are feasible and I have examples to back them up. I’d also recommend watching the video – when everything comes together in a well-deployed PC port, it’s like poetry. The Days Gone settings menu is astonishingly good, for example. But for our first point, we’ll kick off with the big one.
1. Eliminate shader compilation stutter
You may have been aware of my #StutterStruggle over the last year. It’s the situation where no matter how powerful your PC hardware is, gameplay is regularly interrupted by stutter not found in the console versions of the same game. One of the biggest strengths in the PC platform is the diversity of hardware – but what this means is that developers cannot ship pre-compiled shader code with their games in the same way they do on consoles. What’s happening in a vast array of games on PC is that those shaders are compiled during gameplay, as they are needed. While that happens, the game freezes – anything from 30ms to a full second of pausing kicks in, depending on the game and the strength of your CPU. The frequency of these stutters is usually unacceptable in affected titles.
