Why PC Performance Still Matters In 2025
Every year we argue about which game deserves Game of the Year, but for PC players there is another battle going on behind the scenes: performance. It is not just about chasing the highest frame rate number. A game can hit 200 frames per second, but if it stutters, crashes, or looks like a blurry mess, it is not a good PC experience.
In 2025 a lot of big releases landed in the "fine but forgettable" zone for performance. They ran, they were mostly stable, but nothing special from a technical point of view. However a few games really stood out, both for the right and the wrong reasons. On one side you have titles that scale beautifully across a wide range of hardware. On the other you have games that demand monster rigs or heavy upscaling just to feel playable.
Let us look at the best and worst PC development examples of the year and what they tell us about the current state of PC gaming performance.
The Performance Champions Of 2025
Three games showed how smart engine work and sensible feature choices can give PC players great frame rates, good visuals, and solid stability.
Battlefield 6: Raw Performance Done Right
Battlefield 6 quickly became the poster child for what a well optimised PC game looks like in 2025. On an RTX 4070 at 1440p with maximum quality and no upscaling or frame generation, it can hit around 100 frames per second. That is the kind of performance many modern shooters struggle to reach even with aggressive upscaling enabled.
The key design choice was simple but powerful. The developers skipped expensive visual tech like ray tracing at launch and focused instead on high frame rates, scalability, and stability. You still get the trademark Battlefield spectacle: large maps, chaotic firefights, and impressive environmental destruction. The big difference is that this time it all runs smoothly.
Even older hardware from the last decade can handle the game well. That level of scaling is exactly what PC players want, because it respects both budget systems and high end rigs.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: Huge Worlds, Smooth Frames
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is the opposite of a tight arena shooter. It is a sprawling open world full of forests, huge vistas and busy towns packed with NPCs. On paper that sounds like a recipe for stutter and hitching, especially when riding across large distances.
Instead the game surprises with how smooth it feels. Running on CryEngine, it uses clever tech like voxel based software ray tracing for lighting, while avoiding the worst performance traps of modern graphics features. Shader compilation is tucked away in loading screens and background processes, which means you can explore freely without random stutters every time the game needs a new effect.
Even a modest RTX 4050 laptop can hit around 60 frames per second at 1080p on high settings with a touch of DLSS upscaling. For a dense open world RPG, that is impressive. It shows that with smart engine choices and planning, you do not need a flagship GPU to enjoy a visually rich game.
Doom The Dark Ages: Ray Tracing Without The Slide Show
Doom The Dark Ages takes the harder route. Unlike Battlefield 6, it embraces full hardware based ray traced lighting and reflections. That is usually a frame rate killer, especially on mid range GPUs.
Yet on a Ryzen 5 5600X and RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p Ultra, the game can reach around the mid 60s in frames per second with ray tracing on. Turn on DLSS in Quality mode and you can push above 90 frames per second. Even without upscaling it remains playable.
The downside is that the game does not scale as widely as the other two. If your GPU is older than the RTX 20 series or AMD RX 6000 series, you are out of luck. Even an RTX 2060 struggles to hit 40 frames per second at low settings with upscaling. So while Doom The Dark Ages proves that ray tracing can be done well, it also shows how hard it is to keep support for truly older hardware once full ray tracing becomes central to the visuals.
The Performance Disasters Of 2025
Not every big release treated PC players kindly. Some games asked for huge hardware budgets and still failed to deliver a smooth or good looking experience.
Monster Hunter Wilds: Heavy And Underwhelming
Monster Hunter Wilds launched in a rough state and has only improved slightly since. Performance was grim from day one. Even with a Ryzen 7 5700X3D and an RTX 3060 Ti, you could see barely mid 50s in frames per second at 1080p on the lowest quality preset without leaning on upscaling and frame generation.
Worse, the game does not reward you visually for the heavy demands. Maxing out settings does not make it look dramatically better. Environments can feel sparse, colours muted, and image clarity weak. With FSR 3 and frame generation you can hit acceptable performance but you are often stuck with blurry graphics and inconsistent frame pacing.
Ray tracing is barely used and feels more like a token checkbox feature than a real upgrade. The whole package gives the impression that the PC version simply was not a priority.
Borderlands 4: Too Heavy For Its Own Good
Borderlands 4 is a different kind of problem. Technically it can look fantastic. At 4K with its top preset on a high end Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5090, the level of detail and scale is huge. The problem is the cost. Even that monster rig could be limited to around 40 frames per second at launch without upscaling.
Early on, a lot of frustration was directed at Unreal Engine 5, but the deeper issue was design decisions. The game pushes visual complexity far beyond what its art style traditionally needs. Borderlands was never about ultra realistic graphics, but Borderlands 4 behaves like it is, and the frame rates show it.
Post launch patches have cleaned up stability and improved things somewhat, but the damage to player sentiment is done. The game now runs reasonably well, just not well enough to justify the hardware it seems to expect from players.
Gears of War Reloaded: Handheld Heartbreak
Gears of War Reloaded is a remaster of a remaster. On desktop GPUs from the last six years, performance is generally fine even at high settings. The real issue appears on handheld gaming PCs like the Asus ROG Ally.
For what is essentially an older game with updated lighting, it has no business struggling as much as it does on portable hardware. Even with a custom low quality preset and FSR Balanced upscaling, keeping a consistent 60 frames per second is very difficult. Outdoor scenes and heavy CPU workload push frame rates into the 30s with messy frame times, which makes the game feel choppy and unpleasant to play on a handheld.
What This Means For PC Gamers
Looking back at 2025, you can see a pattern. Many studios are comfortable shipping console like frame rates on PC, then relying on upscaling and frame generation to fill the gaps. When performance is treated as a core design goal, like in Battlefield 6 and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, the results are impressive across a wide range of hardware. When it is not, you end up with titles that either demand extreme GPUs or still feel bad even when you throw powerful components at them.
The backlash around games such as Borderlands 4 and Monster Hunter Wilds might nudge publishers to prioritise PC optimisation more in 2026. At the same time, heavy ray tracing and advanced visual effects are not going away, and neither is the trend toward upscaling and frame generation as standard tools.
The good news is that the success of the best optimised games shows what is possible. If some studios can deliver big worlds, solid visuals, and great performance on mainstream CPUs and GPUs, others can follow. For PC players and hardware enthusiasts, that is the kind of pressure the industry needs.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/three-shining-examples-of-brilliant-pc-game-development-in-2025/
