How does game “optimization” work? Are people sitting there changing lines of code to more “optimal” ones? What is “optimized”?

Question

The recent The Last of Us for PC made me realize I had no idea what’s meant by “optimizing” a game.

Same with optifine in Minecraft improving performance. How do these things work to just make games use fewer resources?

In: 158

Answer 1

Optimizing code is basically finding some section of code that is taking up a lot of processing time and (a) skipping doing things that are not necessary such as rendering a tree that is never seen, (b) pushing necessary calculations to specialized hardware that can do it faster, (c) implementing a different algorithm that achieves the same result with lower resources but is more complicated, or (d) removing the feature because it is not needed.