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.

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

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.

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.

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.