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

I can answer for those two games.

Horizon is a finished product. All the content is there and they had time to refine it all, optimize the engine, make compromises along the way and make the best of whatever hardware people were going to be playing it on.

Star Citizen is stil in Alpha. They are working on adding content. Optimization is very much not the focus, and most things are not as optimal as they could be (for example, a good chunk of the graphics processing goes through the CPU, whereas a fully optimized game might utilize the GPU as much as possible).