this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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I have a merely 3 year old PC I bought for 1500€ a 5600x and 3060ti, yet it for some reason can't run cronos, a single player linear game, on low settings without constant lags

The whole game consists of grayscale. There is simply nothing that would require the computing power

And its not really a realistic progress of computing requirements, while they state that my entry level ryzen 5 5600x can run it on optimal settings, for some reason they require an extremely up to date GPU, which just tells me that they just crammed in every kind of graphics tech so their Grayscale smog looks better

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[–] Corelli_III@midwest.social 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

you should be able to run this game, OP, it sounds like a bug

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

Agree. Maybe reinstall the game, see if there is any bullshit running in the background you've installed and forgot about that may be eating resources.

I know world war z will act stupid as hell and crash if you alt+tab out at any point while loading (can do it anytime after game is loaded), could be something simple like that.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 points 22 hours ago

Man i thought i would be excited for Cronos but the more i have seen of it the less i want it. The game looks lazy in so many ways. Lazy burning mechanics, gunplay seems lackluster and not as good as older games. And bloopers writing is best when someone else did it.

People will tell you that we have higher graphical needs but its just mostly lighting which is not even that good and done for laziness as well as set lighting has more intent behind it than just computer decided ray tracing.

There are so many games we can play 1080p 60fps. If it doesnt work on reasonable real world hardware we should just be refunding and moving on.

[–] procapra@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago

Unreal usually has an engine.ini file somewhere. You can more or less mod that file with as many parameters as you can find and nuke the graphics into oblivion. Has worked really well on most games I've tried. Especially useful with games that force trash AA and volumetric fog stuff.

[–] SammyJK@programming.dev 46 points 2 days ago (3 children)

When game developers noticed the market for GPUs is growing and processing in general are getting more advanced, they started to care less about optimizing their games. That's literally it. It's laziness.

There are still devs that do their best to really optimize their games but most studios, especially AAA ones don't care.

[–] lorty@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Developers deserve some blame, but Nvidia does a lot of work to get them to use their proprietary stuff that inly runs "well" on their most recent, high-end GPUs.

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

It’s not laziness, that’s always been a stupid oversimplification. The workers work hard on your entertainment product. It‘s a business decision.

[–] GalacticDeep@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When hearing laziness that’s always been my assumption. Laziness due to business.

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago

Laziness implies that the workers who make the actual games are lazy which is obviously not true, unfair and audacious. Just use the right words.

[–] null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It‘s a business decision

To what end?

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

To optimise project parameters.

[–] null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

In other words, to take a shortcut to avoid expending resources at the cost of quality.

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Yes. It‘s basic theory. Everyone does it all the time and you‘ll always find a customer/user who will say that some aspect of quality has been reduced too much.

[–] null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 1 points 17 hours ago

It's pedantry really. No one thought they meant the devs just didn't feel like optimizing it.

[–] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 2 days ago

Yeah! Check out the impossible port videos by modern vintage gamer.

It really shows how well games could run on older hardware if devs cared to optimize it.

With that being said, someone is porting Mario 64 to the gameboy advance by super optimizing it.

[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

All the better to help me sort through my backlog and wishlist.

[–] apotheotic@beehaw.org 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

From an article I found:

While the Cronos The New Dawn minimum requirements are fairly low, requiring only an Intel Core i5 8400F or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and 16GB of RAM, it seems this isn't enough to run the game at 1080p.

The Cronos The New Dawn recommended specs call for 16GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU, which, apparently, "allows for gameplay in 1080p."

Seems terribly optimized, I'm curious if its unreal engine 5 because that would explain a lot

Edit: yeah that's not surprising, UE5

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The whole game consists of grayscale. There is simply nothing that would require the computing power

I haven't played the game but I just looked up screenshots and those don't look like greyscale? It's toned down but there's colour and lighting effects everywhere. I don't even think colour vs greyscale would have any significant effect on performance. You mention "smog" and there is indeed a lot of mist and fog and whatnot in the pictures I'm seeing - that sounds like it would be a LOT more significant, regardless of colour.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Oof yeah transparency effects are expensive.

Edit: yeah I also looked up screenshots. There are a lot of expensive lighting effects in some of those screenshots.

You want a visually impressive game, you're gonna need a GPU that can keep up. If you want to play an actual grayscale game, try The Return of the Obra Dinn. (It's still full 3D Unity under the hood, so you'll need some GPU, but the stylization effects means they don't need to do anything but basic geometry and static lighting.)

[–] Vinny_93@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

The velocity of graphics development is increasing pretty rapidly. So when you buy a 3060 Ti, you can basically expect to carry it for a generation, but the you'd have to get a 5060 Ti at least.

Basically if you want to hold over the GPU for a couple of generations and still play new AAA games, you'll need at least a 70 Ti.

That said, volumetric fog is an fps killer. Turning it off can greatly increase smoothness. Same goes for ray tracing. The tech is not optimized by a long shot so probably just turn it off.

Also, with Ampere you're stuck with DLSS3 but even that can help you render stuff at 720p and upscale to your needs.

Finally, the quickest way to increase fps is to play at lower resolution. If you are dead set on smoothness and don't really care how it looks, try 1080p if you are not already on it.

It's important to note that game developers are heaping more and more on the GPU, but you do need a proper CPU since it prepares the frames for the GPU to render. You might run some monitoring software in the background like HWmonitor to check which of your components is being crushed. You might also check temps, perhaps your hardware is just throttling because it's dusty and gets too hot.

[–] Thorry@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

3060 TI was a midrange card when it released, I wouldn't expect it to still be viable. You might have bought it 3 years ago, but it released at the end of 2020. So almost 5 years old at this point. With GPU development rates being what they are, that's a long time.

If you still want to get the most out of it: Lower the resolution, this helps a lot. Running at 1080p should probably work just fine. Also check out your memory bandwidth, that is usually the bottleneck for getting the most out of an 5600x. Overclock it if you can, the higher the memory clock, the better it will be.

For the future, my experience is the 70 TI holds up a little bit better than the 60 TI. But this can differ per gen of course. And because of "AI" GPU prices have gone through the roof, so fuck AI.

[–] Luffy879@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Lower the resolution,

I am not going to run a game on 720p, just because I want to play games on my then 800€ GPU

[–] Gerudo@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago

That generation was notoriously overpriced due to covid restrictions. Just because you spent that much doesn't mean it can handle what you think. End story, the game doesn't sound optimized, so you'll have to make some concessions to get it to run better.