It’s been close to a month since Marathon released, not long after Bungie ran a special ‘server slam’ event to essentially give players a free trial while ironing out early bugs and testing server capacity. The $40 extraction shooter peaked at 88,337 concurrent Steam players during launch, but has since dropped off, hitting around 40,000 at peak times, according to SteamDB.

Regardless of what you think about the player count of Marathon so far, or how well it’s doing in general, Bungie has promised fans that it’s “in it for the long haul” while discussing PC performance of the game in an official channel. The company starts by saying, “Marathon is the first DirectX 12 title that Bungie has shipped” – it has been 9 years since its last release, after all.

Feedback from fans is shaping the game and PC performance

Bungie notes that “Marathon has changed visually over the past year,” and thanks fans for all of the feedback so far. It also promises to take user feedback into account when addressing performance, with one of the problems identified so far (for PC players) being CPU optimization.

While we aren’t ready to provide specifics yet, we have already identified some smaller improvements that we can make soon, particularly to improve CPU performance. We also have longer-term changes planned that will further improve CPU performance. Our plan is to get improvements out as soon as we can, rather than wait to drop them all at the same time. (Even though this might make them less obvious!)

While we are very proud of what we have accomplished with the overall look and feel of the game since Alpha, we are in it for the long haul with Marathon. We look forward to many years of steady improvements to every aspect of the game. Thank you for taking this journey with us!

Source: Official Marathon PC Performance Guide

Technical details are also discussed, and Bungie says it’s “normal for CPU utilization % to appear low” for users with high thread counts, as Marathon is a multi-threaded title that can spread the work over multiple CPU cores. That being said, some work is limited by single-threaded performance. One thing the devs specifically mention working on is an improvement to Dynamic Resolution Scaling, “so that it works better in CPU-limited scenarios”.

“We expect Marathon to hit higher frame rates on a new low- or mid-spec CPU compared to an older high-spec CPU, even when the older CPU has more cores,” says Bungie. The devs provide the Ryzen 5 9600X as a shining example for the former. This is despite lower multi-thread performance than something like the Ryzen 9 3950X, so it’s clear that single-thread still matters.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.