Is Tarkov Becoming TOO Big for PCs?

This idea isn’t specific to just Escape From Tarkov, but it’s something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while being in the space of this game, seeing it grow and become more of what the developers want, and at the same time, seeing how as the game gets bigger, what that looks and more importantly feels like on our hardware. Anyone who has played this game for any length of time knows that Tarkov is a demanding game on your PC. Knowing from experience, for years I played this game on a 1070 graphics card, with only 16GB of RAM. And while the card was okay at getting the job done; the game still looked pretty and held up in the FPS department, the RAM is where things got rough. Always spawning late, especially on scav runs; it eventually got to the point where it wasn’t sustainable anymore. Plus, that PC just died after about 5 years, so it had a good run. Now, with a 3060, and 32GB of RAM, you’d think the game would be exponentially more enjoyable to play. But unfortunately, it’s not. Of course, there have been moments in Tarkov’s lifespan where the game was fairly optimized for what we are normally used too. And on the new PC it felt incredible. So, while this wipe was much more stable and had way less game breaking bugs and glitches compared to the previous wipe earlier this year, I can say for sure that the performance has taken a massive nosedive. Which begs the question: is Tarkov becoming too much to handle for PCs?

Now before we go any further, I just want to say that I am a complete noob when it comes to PCs and hardware, and how to optimize and overclock things for maximum performance. It’s just not my forte. So, a lot of what I say will be from game “feel” and not so much raw numbers and stats. I’m sure there will be plenty who are more knowledgeable on this subject than I am, so I encourage anyone who might be able to provide some insight to please leave comments down below and subscribe if you enjoy these videos. But right off the bat, memory leak has been a problem with this wipe since day one. It doesn’t take long playing the game before you will notice a dramatic loss of FPS in the game. For me honestly, it only takes two or three raids before I can visually see and feel it. Granted, I do play with V-Sync on to prevent screen tearing which forces my framerate to match the refresh rate of my monitor being 60hz. And that’s not a big deal for me because the smoothness of the game is much higher when it is locked to 60 versus when I have an uncapped framerate. I can see the fluctuation and while my ADS speed might be faster, I think for myself and the viewing experience in video framerate, locked 60 is fine. But that quickly goes away after a couple of raids. I’ve messed with my in-game settings a lot just to see what happens, and nothing makes enough of a difference other than just dropping the quality of the textures below ultra which I am against because I like my games to look good. At least in Tarkov’s case, the weapons and the sleeves of my PMC’s. That’s what you spend the majority of your time looking at, so why make it look like crap. But yeah, the memory leak of Tarkov has always been a problem, but I can’t remember the last time it was this rough. After the first couple weeks of the previous wipe, the game ran rather smoothly for the most part, with one major exception. And unfortunately, that exception has gotten worse, not better.

Streets is a complicated beast. When it was first introduced, the map was literally unplayable. And I am not being facetious when I say that. Terrible FPS, horrendous lag and desync, and you couldn’t even load into your scav most of the time, at least from personal experience. But to BSG’s credit, they ironed out those kinks quickly and Streets became a map that was playable, but you would feel the FPS hit. I got most of the time high 50’s on my PMC, and low 50’s on my scav. Which I mean isn’t great, but I've played on worse, so I try not to be a snob with framerate in Tarkov. But now, with the expansion, it runs better than day one Streets of the previous wipe, but worse than two days before the wipe. You know what I mean? And while the map itself isn’t completely at fault, the rest of the game struggling makes even trying to play the map a challenge sometimes. I still can’t scav on the map and we are over 21 days into this wipe cycle. Again, let me reiterate; this is from personal experience and conjecture. I am dumb when it comes to computers, and I wish I wasn’t so I could articulate this better. You might have a computer that could run NASA if it needs to and that’s awesome, so you might have zero issues with the map. But for myself and a lot of other people, that is sadly not the case. And we haven’t really been able to enjoy the map and expansion for what it’s worth and what is new and popping. Which is why you are seeing it now, so I can hopefully help paint a better picture of what it can be like. So sadly, Streets has taken a hit, and it isn’t all the maps' faults. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that is causing problems. But they all come ahead on Streets. Especially the packet loss and subsequent rubber banding that you’ve probably seen online.

This game has always had these issues. Rubber banding is basically being put back where you were a few moments ago and visually look like you are stuttering in place. It's something that I can recall happening back in the Gears of War days. Rolling up a flight of stairs only to be either back at the bottom of them, or just turned into a pile of guts. And Tarkov has unfortunately been plagued by this problem too. The only difference was that the game didn’t tell you for the longest time when it was happening. Now, in the top right corner of your screen you will see the icon appear every instance when rubber banding occurs. And it has been rough this wipe regarding this specific networking problem. And Streets is where I’ve seen some of the most egregious examples of rubber banding. It happens on all maps across the game; and is most prevalent at the start of a raid. And then periodically happens throughout the raid. Because let’s be real with ourselves: desync and dying around corners has been a problem since day one. And the hope is that Arena mode has figured out a way to resolve this issue, being smaller maps, less players, no AI, items etc. So, while I could go in depth on it, we all know it and hate it.

All these issues make me wonder what the heck Tarkov 1.0 is going to look like. I honestly and sadly don’t think this game will become an open world or have any map-to-map travel. From the podcast right before patch 13.5 Nikita made a remark to a similar question and basically said if you’re looking for that gameplay loop, we have Skyrim. Which could just be a normal Nikita meme in the works, but there might be more to that than he was letting on. I have serious concerns that those larger scale ideas have been put off to the wayside potentially permanently because it would be such a herculean task to actually get into the game. Open world or map-to-map travel has been my literal dream for this game. But if BSG can’t get around the networking issues that already infect the game, taking to a scale of that magnitude could simply combust the game from the inside out. I’m ignorant of the inner workings of online games, but it wouldn’t surprise me to have my hopes for the game going in that direction dashed within the next year. But who knows, maybe if Arena goes well and it plays without a hitch, perhaps some of that knowledge and tech could be superimposed into the regular game. But with how much tech debt Tarkov has accumulated over the years, we’re going to need more than hopes and wishes.

Tarkov has gotten so much bigger in size since it has been around for almost 6 years. It’s crazy what we have gotten in that timeframe, and it’s honestly nothing short of both impressive and a miracle. But BSG’s work isn’t done yet. There are a lot of issues that need tackling and I hope that they find the solutions necessary to fix them, or at least mitigate them as much as possible. Because I fear this game will eventually get too big for itself and basically be unplayable unless you have the absolute newest and greatest components for a PC. Because Tarkov is not the only game that is bloated for what modern hardware has to offer. This is very much an industry-wide problem that I would love to see resolved in the near future. Thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to watch this video. Let me know in the comments what your thoughts are regarding Tarkov and if it’s becoming too taxing for computers, as well as any other games you play that you feel the same issues creep up in. And subscribe for more videos about a dummy’s hot takes on things he isn’t qualified to speak on. I hope to see you in future ones.