Performance at "max" settings, without context and deep understanding what these settings entail, is completely irrelevant for judging the technical quality of a game, and it's highly damaging how often it seems to be used to evaluate the same. I've wanted to make a thread about this for a while, and seeing how there is right now another one on the front page with "max settings" in the title it seems as good a time as ever.
These days, many people seem to judge the "optimization" (a broadly misunderstood term if I ever saw one!) of games on how they run at "max" settings. What does this mean in practise? Let's say I'm porting a game to PC, and I'm trying to decide which options to include. I could easily add the option of rendering shadow depth buffers at 32 bit precision and up to 4096x4096 instead of the 16 bit and 1024² default. But what would this actually cause to happen? Basically, it will improve IQ and image stability, especially at very high resolution. However, let's assume for the sake of argument that it also halves the framerate of my port, when enabled.
In the prevailing simplistic mindset, I just went from a "great, optimized port" to a "piece of shyt port showing how my company is disrespectful of PC gamers"
merely by adding an option to my game.
I hope everyone can see how fukking insane this is. As a developer aware of this, I basically have 2 options:
- Only allow access to higher-end settings via some ini file or other method which is not easily accessible.
- Simply don't bother with higher-end settings at all.
The first point wouldn't be
too bad, but it seems like the much more rare choice. If the prevailing opinion of my game's technical quality actually goes down by including high-end options, then why bother at all?
Of course, gamers are not to blame for this exclusively. Review sites got into the habit of benchmarking only "max" settings, especially during the latter part of the PS360 generation, simply because GPUs wouldn't be challenged at all in the vast majority of games otherwise.
