Regressions

PC gaming these days seems to be on somewhat of a backward slide.  Actually, that's not entirely correct.  The indie scene remains as vibrant and varied as ever.  However, larger budget computer games are in serious trouble.  The nature of the problem is a bit hard for me to explain.  Not being an expert on computer hardware and software, I'm not sure if I can do the topic justice...still, I'll try to illustrate in general terms.  

Graphics on PC games are handled in no small part by specially designed software such as Vulkan and DirectX.  For the sake of simplicity I'll focus on the old DX11 and new DX12.  As one might expect, DX11 is less capable in terms of potential performance.  On the other hand it's also a lot easier to use.  DX12 allows for far more optimization and customization.  In theory this means nicer looking games, but only if coders know what they're doing.  In fact, if you don't have the time/knowledge/skill it's possible to make games that are a downgrade.  To be exact, we are seeing games that look objectively the same or even worse in DX12 and yet have higher video memory requirements than they would have had in DX11.  PC gaming woes don't end here though, there's also shader compilation stutter.  It's a persistent problem that many game developers don't seem to know how to fix.  The end result is games with frames-per-second counts that dip periodically regardless of the in-game performance settings or processing power of the PC.  It appears that without the "guardrails" that come with DX11 and console dev kits, many programmers can't properly optimize their own work and, worse still, can't devise antiquate solutions (at least for certain game engines such as Unreal).

One might be tempted to say it's time to go back to the drawing board.  However, I think (in many cases) computer programmers need to go back to school and (re)learn the basics of memory usage and allocation.  Also, what is up with all these bland looking video games that take up over 100GB of SSD space?