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

I recommend watching these videos:
https://youtu.be/c33AZBnRHks optimizing code in general, of course those kinds of optimization can be applied in games.
and
https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE the guy goes in detail of everything he did

but it’s very dependent on the game and the way it was implemented in the first place. what’s important generally is to optimize parts of the code that are used the most. there are university courses about game optimization.