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?
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It’s hard to be specific because optimization revolves around knowing how your game specifically works, and then seeing where you can get rid of unnecessary work.
On the code side, it’s often a choice between speed and memory, so it only makes sense to make these changes once you know which ones you have excess of in certain areas of the game, and which one your running out of. You’ll also have a better idea of when you can “cache” data, i.e. process something once and reuse it later. The opposite is also true, if you’re running out of memory you might choose to stop caching data and just take a small performance hit in reprocessing the data, but try to time it for a point in the game where you can sacrifice a few FPS.
On the art side, once you know the models are locked in and aren’t going to be changing you can start merging them together (less individual models means they render faster) and other things that might screw up the workflow if you ever wanted to change them, but allows the computer to work with them better.
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