Three Shining Examples Of Brilliant PC Game Development In 2025
What's been your favourite new game this year? You can read all about our choices right here, with our full Game of the Year Awards 2025 list, but I've got one more for you. Importantly, this one isn't quite so subjective as most 'best of' collections because it reflects something that's really important in PC gaming: performance.
I don't just mean outright frame rates, though that's no small matter. You can have a game that runs at well over 200 fps, but if the graphics are all wonky donkey, or the whole thing is less stable than a block-away-from-disaster game of Jenga, then it'll be no fun to play.
Over the past 12 months, we've dug deep into the performance, graphics, and development quality of 13 games released this year. The majority of these, plus many others that we've played and tested (but not done a full analysis of), were basically fine: not great, not bad, merely okay.
But three stood out for being shining examples of brilliant game development, from a technical perspective. They don't just have excellent graphics and high frame rates, but also rock-steady stability and a wide range of options to help them scale across the vast sea of hardware configurations out there.
Unfortunately, another three excelled at being shining examples of the total opposite: glitchy graphics, inexplicably poor performance, and a heavy reliance on monstrously powerful hardware or upscaling/frame generation just to run at an acceptable pace.
So without further ado, here are the best and worst games of 2025, tech and development-wise.
Battlefield 6 | 4K native, Max quality | Ryzen 9 9900X | RX 9070 XT
If you've already played the game, then our first pick for the best-performing game this year won't be in the least bit surprising. It's Battlefield 6 or, as Andy simply called it, "What a well-optimised game looks like in 2025." How does a frame rate of 100 fps at 1440p on an RTX 4070 sound? How about when I tell you that's with using the game's maximum quality settings and no upscaling or frame generation?
Of course, what's helping a great deal in Battlefield 6 is that its developers completely eschewed all of the latest rendering wizardry, such as ray tracing, to focus solely on maximising performance. That doesn't mean it looks like a bag of sour frogs, though. Environmental destruction has been Battlefield's party piece for many years, and it feels as epic as ever in the latest iteration.
But the best part of it all is just how well it all runs. Even at la
Source: PC Gamer
