Coming from the business side of gaming - this Valve Linux VRAM fix story is genuinely interesting to me, but not for the technical reason. A Valve engineer quietly drops a kernel patch, and suddenly a 4GB GPU that was practically unusable in modern games goes from 14 to 41 FPS in Alan Wake II. No press release. No marketing. Just a fix that triples performance for budget GPU users. From a growth perspective, that’s a massive retained audience - people who were about to give up on PC gaming because their hardware couldn’t keep up. Question for the devs here: how much do you think about low-VRAM users when optimizing your games? Is it even feasible at an indie level, or is that something only studios with Valve-level resources can realistically address?
Question for the devs here: how much do you think about low-VRAM users when optimizing your games?
I generally don’t make games, but I do make other software. Avoiding waste of my users’ resources is one of my guiding principles. It affects my decisions in a variety of ways, ranging from time and effort spent on optimization, to avoiding bloated frameworks like Electron.
A Valve engineer quietly drops a kernel patch, and suddenly a 4GB GPU that was practically unusable in modern games goes from 14 to 41 FPS in Alan Wake II.
Alan Wake II isn’t even available on Steam, right? Epic keeps it exclusive on their store.
Kinda amusing to have Valve be the one fixing it.
Valve’s fix was to Linux swapping. It has nothing to do explicitly with Alan Wake. It just happens that it makes the game playable on a 4gb card on Linux.
I’m a developer, but not a game dev, so I don’t have any inside baseball. But, I think it makes sense–to use a tired phrase: in this economy. Many (most?) gamers aren’t going to be able or willing to upgrade anytime soon, so it makes sense if game studios try to keep low-spec PCs working (for some degree of “working”) as long as possible. There are entire categories of games that could work reasonably well on low-spec PCs when built sensibly.
As a gamer, I know I will be trying to keep my rig alive as long as possible, and if it starts falling behind I would probably just stop looking for new games and play my old ones. I don’t think that’s a very spicy take, and probably one that the game studios are aware of. They will go where the money is. That said, my guess is we will be seeing more focus on mobile gaming going forward. Many people already can’t afford a gaming PC, but most people need a phone.
I think Valve is unusual because they have a lot of money, they do a lot more than just game dev, and they get a lot of goodwill from gamers by being benevolent and giving away stuff like this. They may see it as a floating all boats scenario where their market just grows if more people can access gaming. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Valve game or an indie game on Steam: they still make money from it.
That’s not necessarily the case for indie devs. I think there it is going to be more a case-by-case decision. An indie dev making a game targeted to casual gamers, i.e., someone who will not spend an arm and a leg to upgrade, would be wise to manage resources carefully in order to retain their target demographic. On the other hand, someone making a twitchy FPS targeted to hardcore gamers, i.e., those that will pay big money for a high-end GPU, probably would not need to worry as much about the low-end systems; they’re just not a huge part of their market.
