Journalists named the games of 2024 with the worst optimization on PC – S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was included in the list. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Journalists from the DSOGaming portal, in their traditional holiday material following the results of the outgoing year, decided to highlight the games that were most disappointing with the quality of optimization on PCs.

Image source: Steam (Bay Arena)

The quality of optimization in the eyes of DSOGaming depends on the efficiency of the game’s use of CPU cores, the justification of system requirements, the presence of “console side effects” and “stutters,” as well as the ease of control on a keyboard and mouse.

The portal’s editors noted that they evaluated only current (that is, based on already released patches), and not release versions of games, and did not include projects from early access in the rating.

The top 4 of the DSOGaming anti-rating included (without distribution by places):

• Remake of Until Dawn – a lot of technical problems, client instability, crashes, corrupted saves, broken ray tracing;
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl – the game was released in an unfinished state from a technical point of view and the released patches did not improve the performance or the situation with stuttering;
• Dragon’s Dogma 2 – Seven months after release, the game still suffers from serious problems with CPU optimization, and NPCs still appear out of thin air right in front of the user’s nose;
• Remake of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons – the benefits of Lumen technology are invisible, the controls on PC are “terrible”, and traveling around the world is accompanied by constant stuttering.

Image Sources: 505 Games, Bandai Namco, Capcom, PlayStation, GSC Game World

The DSOGaming editors have identified games with “stuttering” while moving as a separate category. In addition to those listed, the following appeared on the list:

• Frozen 2;
• Black Myth: Wukong;
• Alone in the Dark;
• Infinity Nikki;
• A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead;
• Outcast — A New Beginning.

The worst cases of such slowdowns in 2024, according to DSOGaming, were in the remake of Silent Hill 2 and the anime action game Sand Land. The latter suffered due to the lack of shader precompilation and weak post-release support.

A year ago, DSOGaming’s list of worst PC releases included Wanted: Dead, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Wild Hearts, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Immortals of Aveum and Cities: Skylines II.