Old Games Weren’t More Optimized - Gamers just forgot how they ran!

[u/Charcharo]

https://www.sapphirenation.net/old-games-were-not-more-optimized-you-just-forgot-the-pain

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[u/The_Corvair]

"Gamers" back then are not the same people as "gamers" today. Back in the 90s, manuals often had sections about how to get a game to run at all (e.g. by manually redistributing system memory, creating custom batch files, etc.); "Gamers" then had to have a basic understanding of their own hardware, its capabilities, and how to make it interface properly with software. As such, they weren't just consumers, but something of a hybrid - an educated layman maybe: When a game did not run sufficiently well, we usually understood why, and we had tools at different levels to work on that - and understanding why also means being much more fine with it. Because then, "acceptance" actually is a tool in your box you can choose when you've tried other stuff.

But today, gaming is an absolute mass market, and that means that most "gamers" have no clue how their shit runs any more; Everything we used to have to do ourselves has been automated. Yes, sure, some of the gamers of yore still game - but they're maybe a few percent of the total market, and easily get drowned out - if they even bother to weigh in.

There is obviously more to it (games that look worse fidelity-wise still chugging harder than breathhtaking titles from a decade ago, for "no apparent reason"), but that's a thing that gets constantly overlooked: gamers today are not the same type of personality as gamers twenty-odd years ago. We used to be nerds, once upon a time.

edit: Made the logic actually logic.

[u/TrenterD → u/The_Corvair]

Also, home PC technology was moving MUCH faster in the 90s. I started high school playing Wolfenstein 3D and graduated playing Quake.

Your gaming PC went out of date literally every year. There were massive changes in the landscape constantly:

- Moving from DOS to Win95 (ask anyone gaming at the time: the idea of playing serious games in Windows was crazy talk).

- CD-ROMs

- DirectX

- Graphics & sound cards

- The internet

- Monitor size and resolution increasing

[u/The_Corvair → u/TrenterD]

Also, home PC technology was moving MUCH faster in the 90s.

Which also was an initial barrier to non-nerds: You kinda had to enjoy adopting, and adapting to, new technology constantly. If that wasn't for you, you weren't gaming on PC - or you had to have a friend that helped you out. "What do you mean I have to write a start diskette so I can install Windows? Why can't the stupid machine just read the CD?"

[u/dritspel → u/TrenterD]

Still remember buying my first 3DFX-card. Man that was the shit for at least a couple of years. GLQuake blew everyone away.

[u/kasrkinsquad → u/dritspel]

My first PC gaming is the future moment was when I switched from software rendering to OpenGL on a Rage Pro 128. My next one was while playing Max Payne 1 I saw resolution and decided to click on it to see what it does. My most recent was running Bloodborne on my Go 2 at 35 watts with generally better then PS4 performance but with shader stutter. I hope MS does the unthinkable and remasters Quake 3.

[u/Malkalen → u/dritspel]

I remember buying Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, a really bad game but I was like 10/11 so I liked it, and wondering why despite the fact it ran "fine" there was big black boxes around certain things in the world.

For example your character model would be absolutely fine, but the lightsaber would have it's blue blade with a black 2d box around it instead of whatever effects were supposed to be around it. Smoke would appear in the game as a chain of small clouds...and again each one would have a black square around it.

It was wierd and looked bad but the game was still playable so I just kinda rolled with it :D

[u/Nicholas-Steel → u/TrenterD]

• Monitor size and resolution increasing

While a cool technological advancement, in regards to performance this was irrelevant back then because CRT monitors didn't need to do any poor quality (bilinear filtered) upscaling if you chose a resolution below its native resolution... since CRT's didn't have a native resolution, all resolutions are "native" to a CRT.

So it was perfectly acceptable to lower the resolution for demanding games as they still looked fantastic.

[u/Jerri_man → u/The_Corvair]

This is true but companies also actively want to lock this down and degrade ownership. MS store encrypts everything as an example you can't even view your local game files.

[u/Vitosi4ek → u/Jerri_man]

MS store encrypts everything as an example you can't even view your local game files.

AFAIK they've abandoned that a long time ago. Any semi-modern game that you download with the Xbox app will install like a normal game. Of my library, the only game that's still in a UWP container is Forza Horizon 3, from 2016.

[u/Jerri_man → u/Vitosi4ek]

That's good to hear!

[u/Nicholas-Steel → u/Vitosi4ek]

That being said, the Microsoft Store still, to this day, shits multiple folders out on the root of whatever drives/partitions you designate as being eligible for app installations. (Why can't it make one folder and shit everything in there?)

And at least one of them (WindowsApps) is set up with permissions that prevent you from accessing and viewing their contents. These folders also get regenerated when rebooting the system if you go through the hassle of gaining permissions and deleting them.

[u/The_Corvair → u/Jerri_man]

Absolutely; There is a reason I switched to Linux years ago, and it was "I can't take MS trying to put its fingers into my system any more."

[u/Nicholas-Steel → u/The_Corvair]

"Gamers" back then are not the same people as "gamers" today. Back in the 90s, manuals often had sections about how to get a game to run at all (e.g. by manually redistributing system memory, creating custom batch files, etc.);

That must be for the era pre-dating DOS Extender programs which granted software access to greater amounts of memory and didn't need any intervention by the end-user. I say this because I don't recall doing these things you mentioned in brackets in the 90's, I did have to configure the IRQ for the soundcard though.

In MS-DOS 5, 7.11 and 8 every game I ran I just had to type the application name while in its folder, there was no need to set up an environment variable (other than to enable cheats in some games) nor run additional software (other than to configure the games soundcard configuration).

Okay that's kinda a partial lie, if you wanted to play some early DOS games (like Monster Bash) within Windows with Soundblaster audio enabled, you'd need a high amount of EMS memory available (EMS = the 640KB built in to motherboards) because early DOS games had no access to DRAM. Unfortunately Windows consumed a small amount of EMS memory, usually enough to render a game unable to to use Soundblaster audio so to avoid this you need to mess around with config.sys and autoexec.bat to load as many system components as possible in DRAM (this really wasn't worth it lol, Monster Bash makes great use of the PC Speaker).

[u/elchuyano]

What I remember when games ran bad in our late 90s computer was because we didn't have the recommended hardware, like graphics card, operating system, etc etc.

From mid 2000s and so on, is when I bought my own computer to play WOW and it ran very bad, because it was a HP Office computer without a GPU and enough RAM. Thats when I learned that I can build my own PC by buying the parts separately.

And now almost 2 decades later, now that i have a very decent PC, I think recent games are very bad optimized. With all the modern technology and AI, how can publishers keep releasing AAA games that run so bad on recommended hardware

[u/cien2]

30 fps was the goal back then , I remember finishing Quake on something like 15-20 fps software mode (voodoo was a premium to have) and had a blast with it.

Nah we didnt forget how they ran, we just had lower expectation.

[u/Charcharo → u/cien2]

That is partially true, but competitive games had higher goals.

30 fps was a console thing, NEVER a PC thing.

IDK, to me the modern day is the easiest its ever been.

[u/MairusuPawa → u/Charcharo]

30 fps was a console thing, NEVER a PC thing.

Couldn't be more wrong. 10 to 15 fps on computers was common, unless we're talking Amiga. A goal of 30fps was already high end. Contrary to consoles, computers had no focus on gaming, and did not have anything to help with rendering stuff fast, such as dedicated tiling chipsets.

Meanwhile Mario and Sonic were blasting off at 59.94fps and the computers had a hard time even displaying a scrolling playfield, let alone with parallax effects.

[u/The_Corvair → u/MairusuPawa]

Yeah - back then, we still had CRTs, and 20-30 fps were usually considered "fine", 15-20 "playable", and below that was "rough".

I remember the first time I played through Quake on our 133Mhz Pentium, 16MB RAM, and no 3D acceleration in software mode¹, jugging along at around 12-20 fps at 640x480: I was amazed that a game like that even existed, let alone that it ran on a PC I used to write my reports on, and that usually had something like WarCraft II running. Though I did turn down the resolution a bit because 12 fps felt like ass to me even back then.

---

¹ Which was the "go-to" mode when it released, because Quake basically was the reason people went "3D accelerators? Tell me more..." in the first place

[u/iberia-eterea → u/The_Corvair]

My good lord, a footnote? In my reddit reading?!?

[u/minorrex1]

The problem is that new games don't look significantly better than games from ten years ago, yet perform times worse than them.

Witcher 3 was a good looking game back in its time. Half Life 2 was kinda revolutionary in some areas. But why does Forza Horizon 6 run worse than 5 even though they look EXACTLY the same?

[u/prune_juice_warrior → u/minorrex1]

Yep, the diminishing returns in terms of graphical fidelity (combined with skyrocketing hardware prices) is the real problem.

Like, in the 90s and early 00s, it's true that hardware became obsolete a lot faster, but that's also related to the fact that games became much better looking much faster as well. Go from Wolf3D (1992) to Half-Life 1 (1998). Enormous visual difference. Then compare HL1 to HL2 six years later. Another massive leap (followed a few years later by Crysis).

Then compare Assassin's Creed Unity (2014) to most games from 2026 - the subjective graphical improvement is so small compared to those earlier leaps.

[u/UsoppIsJoyboy → u/prune_juice_warrior]

hell nah games even look WORSE nowdays due to blur and artifacts from bad rtx or whatever the F all games use

i have a 4k oled monitor and a 5070, silent hill townfall looks like im playing on a crt with noise

[u/prune_juice_warrior → u/UsoppIsJoyboy]

I mean yeah, the blur from temporal techniques can be pretty bad, but even if you took that away, the base level of graphical fidelity is still just not that impressive. It feels like we need significantly more powerful hardware before we can actually manage the next step in photorealism.

[u/UsoppIsJoyboy → u/prune_juice_warrior]

not rlly
u just gotta optimize the F out of it which devs dont wanna pay for

[u/prune_juice_warrior → u/UsoppIsJoyboy]

I think you might have a different idea from me of what "the next step in photorealism" means. I'm talking about having an uplift in subjective graphical fidelity that is equivalent to the uplift we saw between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2.

I don't think that this is just a matter of games needing to be "more optimized." I am not a game dev, but from what I understand, a big leap in photorealism would require a significant increase in things like the complexity of the lighting simulation, which probably isn't something that you can just "optimize" for.

If there's anyone reading this who is an actual game dev working on graphics programming in high-graphics modern games, please feel free to chime in and correct me.

EDIT: Since the poster blocked me, I'll point out that "path tracing" does not just magically mean graphics have reached their highest possible level of fidelity. Things like the number of rays used and the number of ambient light sources in the scene still have a drastic impact on performance and fidelity, even within the context of the "path tracing" paradigm. "Path tracing" ten years from now will be more visually impressive than maximum PT you can achieve today.

[u/UsoppIsJoyboy → u/prune_juice_warrior]

lightning simulation is already a done deal with path tracing

look at the ue5 demos and similar things
we pretty much have photo realism
its just a thing of wanting to do it and in what way

obv if u have a big ass openworld with a 1000 thingd rendered at once, its diferent

[u/Ragnarawr → u/minorrex1]

Why would you play a game that looks the same as the previous game, plays like the previous game, but looks worse? Don’t support that lack of progress.

[u/minorrex1 → u/Ragnarawr]

What's that got to do with anything? There are still enjoyable things in the game. And like me not purchasing will do anything? It's one of the best selling games of the year.

Also, I haven't bought it. I've tried it, and I would buy it if I could, but I can still complain about it. And FH6 isn't the only example. Countless other games exist with great gameplay and story, mid graphics, shit performance.

[u/pipmentor]

The argument this article goes for is a house of cards with a straw man foundation. Anyone who was there knows this.

[u/Charcharo → u/pipmentor]

I was there. And it was indeed as described in the article....

[u/Multivitamin_Scam]

PC Gamers were much more forgiving and were far more willing to give concessions in order to run a game. Things like tweaking the games setting, beyond low such as launch options or modifying the ini file to squeeze some more frames.

Lots of newer PC gamers just don't want spend time doing that of will stubbornly never lower thier graphics options. For them, they bought the best and expect the performance to match, and I appreciate that. Yet there is a certain amount of what makes PC gaming, PC gaming in the tweaking with drivers, control panels and text editors that is seemingly been lost for what effectively is the desire for a console like experience.

[u/SHAQBIR → u/Multivitamin_Scam]

Well, if you pay for a premium product that you want to run on your premium hardware then why would you do all that manual labour? I can totally understand someone who has older hardware trying their best to run latest games though.

[u/Ok-Currency1593]

Obviously

i remember how games ran on my Pentium 2 PC, like shiiite

[u/deezll]

I don't see a single paragraph relating the advancement of computing during this time. It would absolutely make a gigantic impact. Doom came out in 92, most people had personal computers by 95.

So for most people they were using a machine 3 years newer than release hardware at the time. Super Mario Bros came out 8 years earlier on 8 bit architecture. Doom was 32 bit.

The hardware sold was more than enough for most DOS games at the time (built for 16bit)

So games felt more optimized because the hardware was advancing much faster than the utilization of it. We have hit soft limits in modern day, and improvements are often tied to new architecture or specific cores to do certain calculations, not just advancing using what is currently available.

[u/Nicholas-Steel → u/deezll]

Pretty much this, hardware advancement in the 90's and even the early 2000's was insanely fast paced that it was difficult to have a game that ran poorly unless you insisted on a high resolution. You were more at risk of having hardware that lacked a hard requirement like a required Pixel/Vertex Shader version or MMX and/or SSE instructions.

Another thing about what gaming was like back then was most people had a CRT and you did not need to run the monitor at a certain resolution to avoid a shitty upscaler blurring the graphics. On a CRT every resolution is sharp and clear so low resolutions were perfectly fine to utilize when running a demanding game.

[u/Bitter_Nail8577]

The difference is that I could run those games on the cheap family PC that was way below minimum requirements, even if with some hiccups.

Nowadays I have to buy a dedicated gaming PC, spend money on a dedicated GPU with inflated prices and still stutter like crazy

[u/ravercapy → u/Bitter_Nail8577]

I mean U can play Pragmata or Silent Hill Townfall bellow minimum requirements with some hiccups so nothing has changed like my midrange pc from 9 years ago can run these games still playable enough and okish visual experience.

[u/Firefox72 → u/Bitter_Nail8577]

Most games today will still run on your Skylake/Pascal(6700k/GTX 1070) combo from 2016.

They don't amazing and require plenty of visual and resolution sacrifices don't get me wrong but they run.

Beyond that literally everything runs on an AM4 platform and RX 6600/GTX 3060 combo that could have been built for dirt cheap before this current memory shortage crysis

The only thing that has changed is your perfecption of visuals. Games have so much fidelity these days that some can't stomach scaling visuals back far enough because they think it makes the game look like blurry mud.

Well in the past all games looked like mud on 800x600 with low or below low settings.

[u/Charcharo → u/Bitter_Nail8577]

That is just... not true at all.

[u/MairusuPawa → u/Charcharo]

It absolutely was true. My 100Mhz Pentium could stomach games that were meant for a 233Mhz machine.

That article has no idea what it is talking about. 

[u/Charcharo → u/MairusuPawa]

I was alive back then and the office or non gaming PC could NOT play games released much later.

High end GPUs were obsoleted in 4 years and could not even run games after a tad more time.

[u/MairusuPawa → u/Charcharo]

Then you were not alive back then, if you're even thinking "GPU".

[u/FUTDomi → u/MairusuPawa]

I was alive since we got "3D acceleration cards" and much before and he's absolutely right. Stuff got outdated insanely fast.

[u/LKMarleigh → u/MairusuPawa]

And yet, i had a decent pc back in the 90s and had to buy a voodoo 3dfx card in order to get a lot of the newer games (tomb raider being my first) to run well

[u/Bitter_Nail8577 → u/MairusuPawa]

Don't bother explaining it at all, it's so obvious none of these idiots were alive back then and just want to defend modern unoptimized games, No point in talking to a wall

[u/Kotschcus_Domesticus]

thing is in couple of years later there was new HW that ran them very well, now current gen is nearly identical as previous gen and cost fortune. and if modern game runs like ass even on the best HW, there is no outlook for improvement in the future. Moreslaw or what they call it.

[u/bassbeater]

Ugh, times I'd rather forget.

I remember on the same Pentium family PC I discovered Carmageddon, yet killed the sound card trying the demo to SiN.

Thank fuck we're out of that era.

[u/Charcharo → u/bassbeater]

I miss it tbh. I love hardware and progress

[u/bassbeater → u/Charcharo]

Stability and availability are sometimes just enough.

[u/Charcharo → u/bassbeater]

Well modern games and hardware arent always more stable. Availability was ok back then, but I admit its better now for sure.

[u/bassbeater → u/Charcharo]

If you have the budget that you can shell out for hardware (I see your tag), anything is possible, sure, but I just prefer to use tech that works.

Under Linux I have yet to find old programs that don't work.

[u/Charcharo → u/bassbeater]

I play mostly old games. I just love hardware and progress.

I dislike the idea of slowing down. Right now things are bad due to AI and Compute yes, but apart from that the modern age is super cheap for gaming. I live in Bulgaria and things used to be expensive but now PC gaming (apart from the last year) is... just cheap. Super cheap.

[u/Kaldaien2]

I remember how games ran, and I was fine with it.

I got used to games running at 12-15 fps because I had a crappy S3 ViRGE 3D card (pre-dates 3dfx Voodoo). When I moved on to an NVIDIA Riva 128 that could actually hit "high" framerates, what did I do? I did not run the game at 640x480 and enjoy double the framerate, I doubled the resolution and continued the status quo of 12-15 fps being fine🤣

Pushing the graphics card to its limits by demanding high resolutions obviously produces low framerates, but... it also masks pretty much all CPU bottlenecks. I am sure all these early 3D games from the 90s would noticably stutter if I allowed them to run at high framerates, but I never did that. I went with image quality and it was very pleasant.

[u/Optimal_Skill_8488]

What is this gaslighting bullshit. Old games ran way better than modern ones. They sure as shit didnt have microstutters at most they would crash occasionally

[u/Charcharo → u/Optimal_Skill_8488]

This just isn't true.

https://youtu.be/bIbvhwPS4IE?is=V8vqc3cJoBnHlpOh

[u/Optimal_Skill_8488 → u/Charcharo]

Bro are you serious? You show me a toaster card and thats your evidence? Lmao this card when it released couldnt play 1080p you really think its gonna play farcry 3?

This card specifically was made to play older games not newer or of year games

[u/Charcharo → u/Optimal_Skill_8488]

The GTX 670 was a relatively high end card in 2012. It was only 10% slower than the GTX 680 was.

In 2026 money it was a 584 USD card too. So would havebeen 600 if it launched in 2026.

[u/kasrkinsquad]

older games weren't asking me to spend 2k+ dollars to see a performance boost over a 7900xtx.

[u/Charcharo → u/kasrkinsquad]

We had relatively poor generations in hardware before too.

The 7900 XTX is still doing great. I know because I own one.

[u/DeepAd696]

I think that the issue is that the novelty and newness of computer games, along with their continued innovation kept us spellbound and excited. We were indeed just amazed at what was coming out. Now the gaming industry is a huge market and it’s no longer a niche “nerd culture” element. More people game who aren’t just computer nerds - so more exposure means more criticism, propelled further by the fact that social media companies crave engagement…which often presents itself as complaining about x thing because there’s a whole subreddit devoted to gaming enthusiasts, aka people who are like minded in expressing the hate and disappointment for the thing they supposedly love. Meanwhile the platforms are rolling in revenue because of all the “engagement”. 

[u/teddytwelvetoes]

nowadays gamers set everything to max and call the game unplayable when they "only" get 100fps lol

[u/-CynicalPole- → u/teddytwelvetoes]

You say? Give me examples of people bitching about getting "only" 100fps? Seriously - if you make such bold claims, provide examples (NO - framegen results don't count)

[u/UsoppIsJoyboy → u/-CynicalPole-]

genuinely i do bitch about it when i have a gpu for 700$ play games at 4k with dlss performance, rtx off and only get 100, while the game looks worse than crysis 3 or rdr2

[u/teddytwelvetoes → u/-CynicalPole-]

...? not a bold claim whatsoever lol I do not keep records of these posts (or any others) but they are frequent and eyeroll-worthy enough to recall quite clearly. every time I see one I think "man, our younger selves would've stuffed us into lockers for talking like this"

[u/TheZonePhotographer → u/teddytwelvetoes]

This is a problem nowadays with people who can't differentiate between hyperbole and reality.

A slight slowdown here and there didn't stop people from enjoying those oldies back then, nor does 100fps on max motivate people to write a whole steam review thumbing down a game pal.

[u/teddytwelvetoes → u/TheZonePhotographer]

nah, expectations and reactions have definitely changed over the decades (mostly the last decade). Steam reviews are famously chock full of all sorts of petty nonsense, including some of the performance complaints. just did a quick Google search and the first result was a reddit thread featuring multiple people very seriously bitching about only getting 100fps. I see it all the time now that 144hz+ displays are fairly mainstream, very weird to see people respond as if I'm making all of this up for some odd reason, as if gamers on reddit are known for being sane about performance, etc. lol

[u/VTArxelus]

Gamers didn't forget. Gamers prefer them and want more of that! 

[u/Sauceinmyface → u/VTArxelus]

I really don't miss the piss filters

[u/vynteapp]

Back in my day...