Eli5: How can a game such as Horizon Forbidden West look and run as beautiful and smooth as it does, when comparatively uglier games such as Star Citizen run terribly?

Question

I’d like to be able to understand how the aforementioned example looks like so ahead of the curve graphically while also running really well. It has very taxing visuals that I can identify, such as dense foliage, detailed physics and animations, and incredible lighting. It doesn’t seem to compromise in ways that other games such as Star Citizen do, and yet I get way better performance out of it too.

In: Technology

Answer 1

To add on about star citizen itself, besides being pre alpha where it doesn’t make sense to do a lot of optimization, they aren’t faking some things commonly faked in games. When you travel in an elevator to your hanger you aren’t sitting in a box where they fake the travel, you’re actually moving. When you blow up a ship it has long persistence with a lot of discrete stuff track to support salvage gameplay loops, your ships thrusters aren’t just an animation and are actually doing stuff, and when you’re in your ship you don’t animate into the cockpit and become one entity.