Currently running a Ryzen 2600 and AMD 6700XT, older cpu with mid tier gpu. This is my round up of 2023 gaming
Installed Dead Space remake on gamepass, stutters everywhere, apparently not limited to older hardware. Played Resident Evil 4 Remake instead, fantastic reimagining of the original, super tight controls, darker tone, less annoying Ashley. Platinumed it on Steam.
Remnant 2 went on sale, got it, textures were weirdly smeared, FPS was low, Played Lies of P instead running on UE4 instead of UE5, caught off guard by how good the combat, story and music was.
Got Wo Long, felt like playing with glue, refunded, went for an older Team Ninja game** Final Fantasy Origin: Strangers of Paradise** not a fantastic game, but good for chilling with, pick up and play, run a few builds, crush chaos, felt the typical Team Ninja slow motion during busy fights.
Wanted to play Jedi Survivor or Starfield, heard about PC problems, played Like a Dragon: Man who Erased his Name instead, small side story, essentially the penultimate chapter of Kiryu's story, nothing new was added, story was great.
Hogwarts Legacy, ran terrible, boring gameplay. Hi Fi Rush, ran great, fun rhythm based combat. Cocoon, mild performance issues, but otherwise excellent puzzle game with mind bending twists.
All in all, it seems that games built on older engines still looked comparable to new gen games, but ran better. I imagine that once developers get the hang of things, the performance may improve. Capcom is great at PC now and EA still sucks. Indie games greatly depended if studios knew how to scope their project and play to their strengths.
Make sure your games are on a SSD, this isn't optional anymore; modern games often rely on loading assets as they are needed and if they fail to do that it could appear to stutter, among other issues. This is particularly important for UE games.
Additionally that smearing effect you mentioned could be FSR loading low resolution textures. Try tweaking your settings related to it.
Confirm, that your AMD drivers are up to date. Also If your ram supports XMP or a equivalent feature enable it to benefit from your ram. This is often overlooked.
Enable "Above 4G Decoding". Consult your motherboard manual for details on how to do that.
Additionally if your game offers a choice between directX or Vulkan.
Choose Vulkan, if you experience problems try the DirectX options.
All running on SSD, but I aim to run at 1440p and more than 60fps. RE4 looked better than most games and had buttery smooth performance, really important for the 'speedrun' type trophies