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

One implementation of certain optimizations, including a feature in Optifine, it calls “fast math”. In this case they take expensive math operations, like calculating sine, cosine, or square roots and replace them with faster less accurate functions. These functions are used a lot in graphics processing, so there can be some significant gains by reducing the amount of time those operations take.