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

>Are people sitting there changing lines of code to more “optimal” ones?

in eli5: yes, they replace one way of doing things with a more opptimal one

there are many ways you can optimize games, like replacing how you store, process and access data, removing/remodeling procedures which slow down (bottleneck) the rest of your code, redesign processes so you can distribute it across multiple threads