Most people are aware that modern games are terribly optimized and some try to understand why that is.

Im not a high-end gamer, by no means, but after finding those technical videos, I kinda of agree with his points and how he presents it.
After Digital Foundry cited him and despised him instead of arguing against his arguments, it made more sense to me.

To understand that, I recommend his channel:

Epic's Unreal Optimization Disaster | Why Nanite Tanks Performance!
https://youtu.be/M00DGjAP-mU

Why You Should Unsubscribe From Digital Foundry | Protecting Game Graphic Standards
https://youtu.be/NxjhtkzuH9M

This has been discussed already around this forum and how modern GPUs are a market that is fed through this kind of behaviour, so nothing more to add here. Just recommending the channel.

Edit:
Corrections and to add this:

If I remember correctly this was the first video I watched from his channel. Really impressive:

Fake Optimization in Modern Graphics (And How We Hope To Save It)
https://youtu.be/lJu_DgCHfx4

How long have you been gaming? It's been known that older games, which ran great on old hardware at the time, run terribly today.

There's a lot of things at play here. Yes, part of it is good programming (I have a background in programming, even made my own DOS-like OS with it's own bootloader, but nowhere near the complexity of DOS even. It was written in assembly and I started to build my own API. It was FUN but HARD). You program into APIs. For example, and why games like Quake still run today is it had great compatibility, used API's like DirectX, OpenGL, etc.

Then you have drivers. Hardware has changed over the years. Ever here about "unified drivers"? It's an attempt to pull several generations of hardware into a single unified driver, for better compatibility.

So yeah. There's a lot underneath the surface. The fact that Windows has the compatibility it does is a near miracle. That I can still play Dark Forces 2, for example, after almost 30 years is amazing.

But Battlefield 1942? Yeah it runs, but it runs like a dog today. Crysis runs amazingly well on this low-end computer I have. Go figure.

By the way, if you want the best compatibility, use software rendering. I've found that games that had software rendering still run great today. Hardware API's like DirectX (OpenGL is much better) is sketchy. Even GOG includes directx wrappers with some of their games, cause it didn't hold over well over the years. Just my 2 cents.

Regarding nanite and lumen, the problem is that Epic pushing it way too hard and fast, before the tech has had time to fully mature. But I can see them becoming great, eventually.

Regarding the other stuff, especially with digital foundry, nothing to be said there, really. The entire idustry is ridden with stuff like this, from top to bottom. Especially apparent, as Digital Foundry falls under the same umbrella as many mainstream "gaming journalist" outlets (Gamer Network/Ziff Davis). It's all been a massive circlejerk for a long time.

none of it ever does, were always paying for the next best thing to let us down.

I do hate how modern games are so damn blurry nowadays. He's talking about newer games running like crap on high end PC when they should not.

Silent Hill 2's remake is a perfect example of a poorly optimized game. I can't even get solid framerates at 1080p with ray tracing off. I'm using a 4070, a 13th Gen Intel Core i7, and 16GB of DDR5.

No reason that game should run so bad.

This video might help you understand why:

Fake Optimization in Modern Graphics (And How We Hope To Save It)
https://youtu.be/lJu_DgCHfx4

I was just watching his Alan wake 2 video. :)

@ Syphon72;

Understood. But I was trying to give an example as to WHY it happens. There's a lot that happens from top to bottom that can affect performance and compatibility. BTW, a 4070 is no slouch. I've never played any Silent Hill games, so I can't speak about that.

In simplest terms; if you can code the same algorithm/function in fewer lines and it takes x amounts cycles faster to execute, that's optimization.

This has been going on for at least about a decade now and it's pretty much systemic as overall quality of games have dropped thus more people work on them, while publishers and "gaming journalists" hypes up games to be better and more popular than they really are.

In the 80's and 90's developers HAD to think about optimization due to hardware restraints. This is one of the reason I have huge respect for the demo scene.

And as someone recently reminded me of, there are parallels to the 80's crash; pumping out more and more crappy games while gamers get more and more fed up. I'd say it's, again, manly a western sickness because eastern games at least AA/AAA tends to be much better.

I'm not saying that the claims here aren't true, just that my memory begs to differ ... at least a bit.

The success rate for being able to play a game on modern PCs is much better than it used to be. No doubt some of that is due to power and brute force.

I well remember how hard it was to get some games to run on some PCs, despite the specs. A lot of it though, was down to compatibility of parts, where you had to mix and match hardware properly. Just having the best of this and the best of that and putting them together was no guarantee, the hardware bits had to be compatible with each other.

That's why purpose built gaming PCs often came into their own, rather than something you knocked up yourself from recommended parts.

It's also why consoles were so much more superior in many ways ... but not all.

So much like 'America Used To Be Great', there was no golden gaming age of the PC, where everything just worked great.

You could be lucky, but many folk weren't. I think things have improved a bit in that regard, despite the modern coding issues of many games .... part of that being what was used to create the game.