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

Optimising is a process, it isn’t one specific thing you do. Basically any change you make to improve program performance is optimisation, and that’s generally achieved by using fewer system resources.

It can be anything including removing unnecessary code, simplifying complex code, taking shortcuts, hardcoding things with safe assumptions, using different code that works better with certain platforms/hardware. Sometimes you can tweak things to achieve massive performance gains with minimal noticeable impact.