u/LSA-Mulder

Two months of development. Two months. And this is the grand result. Suppression.

Absolutely groundbreaking work. Someone shoots at you and your gun politely points at the sky. A brilliant solution to the age-old problem of getting shot at. Why improve gunfights when you can simply make the weapon stop working?

And the bullet crack is about 1,000 times louder than everything else. Truly impressive. It sounds less like incoming fire and more like the audio engineer discovered one slider and decided to make it everyone else's problem.

Real incoming fire can give you a sharp ballistic crack from a supersonic round, sometimes accompanied by the characteristic whiz of a bullet passing nearby. This sounds like they recorded a single "CRACK" sample, turned the volume knob until it started clipping, and called it a day.

Apparently, this was already ready two months ago. Which makes the whole "we've been testing it" story even more impressive. Two months of testing and this is what made it through the gates. NASA would be taking notes.

At this point, I genuinely respect the commitment. It takes a special kind of confidence to spend two months polishing a feature that feels like it was added during a coffee break just before lunch.

But hey, at least we got another carefully rationed bone to chew on while the rest of the game sits there waiting.

The competition is coming. And honestly, I cannot wait to see what happens when the developers finally have something to compete against besides their own roadmap.

OVI announced another trash update right after Wardogs announced its September 2026 release. Kind of pathetic.

Imagine it took them 2 months to adjust a few values and create simple animation of vignette!!!

OVI is releasing yet another trash update, reverting changes they made years ago. Changes nobody asked in the first place, yet they are presenting them as an innovative update.

In the meantime, there are 0 performance improvements and 0 meaningful bug fixes. They still haven't fixed simple, long-standing issues such as roles becoming locked even when the role has already been selected, servers failing to display queued players, or the inability to hear enemy footsteps right next to you. And those are just a few examples out of the thousands of issues OVI doesn't even acknowledge.

I'd also like to remind everyone that OVI was supposed to fix vehicle physics by the end of March 2026. After yet another failure, they simply abandoned tracked vehicle physics altogether.

Remember that the next update was supposed to be the biggest optimization update yet. You'll see very soon that OVI is once again sitting around in the studio scratching their balls, trying to figure out how to bullshit players about optimization.

They're not in full panic mode yet because of the growing interest in Wardogs and other upcoming games. But give it some time. Soon enough, you'll see them flopping around like fish out of water, desperately trying to keep themselves afloat.

I compared HWiNFO logs from Squad and the Wardogs Alpha playtest on the same Ryzen 9 7900X system.

The difference is pretty striking:

Metric| Squad| Wardogs Alpha

Average FPS| 120 fps| 160 fps

Average CPU usage| 27.4%| 45.9%

CPU Package Power| 117 W| 127.5 W

CPU temperature| 77.7°C| 87.3°C

Avg. Effective Clock| 1.61 GHz| 2.55 GHz

Highest Effective Clock| 4.81 GHz| 5.02 GHz

Threads ≥20%| 14/24 (58%)| 24/24 (100%)

Threads ≥30%| 9/24 (38%)| 20/24 (83%)

Threads ≥40%| 7/24 (29%)| 15/24 (63%)

Threads ≥50%| 1/24 (4%)| 10/24 (42%)

Threads ≥60%| 0/24 (0%)| 6/24 (25%)

Thermal throttling| No| No

The 7900X is only one example. The broader issue is how Squad utilizes modern multi-core CPUs.

Squad still appears to concentrate significant workloads on a relatively small number of threads instead of efficiently distributing them across the available CPU resources.

This matters enormously in a large-scale multiplayer game. When you have dozens of players, networking, game simulation, physics, visibility, world updates and thousands of actors being processed, CPU frame time can become a much more important limitation than GPU performance.

A faster GPU cannot fix a CPU workload that does not scale properly across available cores and threads.

This is why saying "Squad only uses 27% CPU" completely misses the point. Total CPU utilization can look low while the game is still limited by a small number of heavily loaded threads.

And now Squad is on UE5.7.

UE5.7 provides tools for building much more heavily parallelized workloads, but the engine version itself does not magically multithread existing game code. Developers have to actually redesign and optimize the workload to take advantage of those capabilities.

Wardogs Alpha shows that a modern UE5 multiplayer game can distribute substantially more work across a modern multi-core CPU.

Squad still doesn't.

At some point, "the engine" stops being an excuse. OVI has had the tools and the time to address this.

The problem is not that modern CPUs are too weak.

The problem is that Squad still isn't making effective use of the CPU resources available to it.

BTW, the newest Adrenalin 26.7.1 driver brings FSR 4 back to Squad, but it still looks like trash.

Just to put into perspective how slow Squad's development appears to be: if the game is already running on UE 5.7 and DLSS is already integrated, implementing the latest AMD FSR SDK 2.3 with native FSR Upscaling 4.1.1 should, in my estimation, be a relatively small task. We're probably talking about roughly one to two weeks of work for one experienced rendering engineer, or at most two engineers, including integration, testing, and fixing issues.

That's how bad and slow Squad's development process looks from the outside. Instead of putting in what should be a relatively modest amount of engineering effort to bring modern upscaling technology to the game, they seem to prioritize the bare minimum while producing manipulative videos filled with misleading claims and marketing BS.

The problem isn't that FSR 4.1.1 is some impossible technology to integrate. The problem is the apparent lack of willingness to actually invest the engineering effort required to improve the game.

I wonder if anyone has informed OVI that FSR 4 can no longer be overridden via Adrenalin software.

They might not be aware of this, since they don’t play their own game, and all AMD GPU owners have left.

Would you buy a true spiritual successor to Project Reality made by a competent studio using either a heavily modified Unreal Engine 5 or a custom in-house engine, featuring:

- a well-optimized engine,

- huge combined arms maps,

- multiple types of fixed-wing aircraft,

- attack and transport helicopters,

- effective counters to air assets,

- commander supply and vehicle drops,

- carefully designed pre-built scenarios that promote varied tactics while maintaining good gameplay balance?

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The question is simple. Will OVI finally optimize the game as promised this summer, or will we get another round of tiny tweaks, "optimization is a process," and a sudden influx of people claiming everything runs flawlessly on their end?

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