Graphics API's are broken, graphics Drivers are morbidly obese (literally, no joking, millions of lines of code, much of it dedicated to hacking around broken crap and issues). They are all broken. Direct X is broken. OpenGL is broken. Nearly every game ships broken,
and honestly it is not the developer's fault. I wish I could explain people the absolute nightmare of a mess we are in, in terms of industry graphics standard, but the PC vs Consoles war has drowned it out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821854
also:
"
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/"
"The first lesson is: Nearly every game ships broken. We're talking major AAA titles from vendors who are everyday names in the industry. In some cases, we're talking about blatant violations of API rules - one D3D9 game never even called BeginFrame/EndFrame. Some are mistakes or oversights - one shipped bad shaders that heavily impacted performance on NV drivers. These things were day to day occurrences that went into a bug tracker. Then somebody would go in, find out what the game screwed up, and patch the driver to deal with it. There are lots of optional patches already in the driver that are simply toggled on or off as per-game settings, and then hacks that are more specific to games - up to and including total replacement of the shipping shaders with custom versions by the driver team. Ever wondered why nearly every major game release is accompanied by a matching driver release from AMD and/or NVIDIA? There you go."
Focus on that last quote:
"Ever wondered why nearly every major game release is accompanied by a matching driver release from AMD and/or NVIDIA? There you go"
I apologize I may lack the linguistic skills to explain it, but here's my best attempt: The game ships broken because it doesn't conform to a right spec, because the spec itself is dumb, the company that makes the spec then basically puts in patches, that are really 'exceptions' that allow the broken thing to run.
Generally, it can be much more difficult depending on the platform to fix it. This sometimes ends up being consoles, sometimes its PC. In any case, the pretty things you see on the screen is generally the result of graphics programmers doing their best with absolute bullcrap for tools. My heart goes out to them.
Whether a game is broken or not often is not related to the amount of power the machine running it has. It's a software issue, not just a hardware issue (whole other can of worms there btw).
Literally, it's an awful time to be a graphics programmer right now. They have nothing to work with but CRAP. It's no wonder, in a job like programming that has 70+% job satisfaction, that Graphics programmers are generally the most miserable among us:
http://www.sitepoint.com/2015-stack-overflow-developer-survey/
