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

Coding is just telling the computer to do stuff. Optimizing is going into more and more detail, being very specific, do this in this very specific way, ignore that, load this while calculating that, get rid of this NOW, show this but not that, instead of just letting the computer do it in some easily understood way, no matter how long it’ll take, and how many resources it might take.

It’s trading human time and effort for computers doing stuff faster and using fewer resources.

In the specific case of the Last of Us, the game was already optimized for a different type of computer, and what works for one might be a dumb decision for another.