If people say a game is poorly optimized, what do they mean? And how do you “optimize” a game?

Question

Edit: Really enjoy threads like this, because you learn and see so many Pov.

My favourite answer (not in this thread unfortunately) was:

*”If you write a story, the number of words you use can affect the reader’s experience.*

*Use too many words, and the reader takes a long time to get through the book, has difficulty remembering everything, and can’t separate what’s important and what’s not.*

*But use too few words and the reader will get an incomplete picture, make mistakes in understanding the story, and eventually become disinvested in the book.*

*A poorly optimized game is like one of these examples. Either too much goes in, making it difficult for the hardware to cope, or not enough goes in, making the game buggy and broken. (Sometimes both, but that’s beyond ELI5).*

*When it comes to optimising a reader’s experience, it is not about putting more or less words in but choosing the right combination of the right words at the correct time in the plot. Optimising a game is similar concept.*

*Most importantly, no matter how well you write a book, there are always people who will think it could’ve been written better, especially by them. “*

In: 404

Answer 1

People say a game is poorly optimized when they have top-of-the-line GPU and it still runs poorly. What it does mean in reality– it can be 2 ways:

1) The most common: Game is literally done (or ported to other platform) poorly, even stuttering with newest hardware; in this category falls some anti-cheat, which required to be run along the game, eating computation power by itself.

2) Complaining person doesn’t understand that game itself isn’t only picture, but inner game mechanics and calculations, and they bought top GPU and sub-par CPU. Complaining person can’t comprehend that despite some two games might look the same, one of them have simple gameplay, like “beating enemies with such damage, they have such hitpoints” and that’s all, and other game is calculating every enemy’s gear, skills, effects, sight and hearing, and simulating living NPC gathering resources on the map out of the player’s view. The first one is called by that person “optimized”, and the second “unoptimized”.

Therefore, in point 1 optimization means “rewrite code to make it simpler and more effective”, and in point 2 “get rid of complex mechanics”.