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
So there’s a lot of elements in a game – models, textures, sounds, lighting, particle effects, to list just a few. A lot of this is down to a mix of balancing visual fidelity with how smoothly the game runs.
Models (as in the physical forms that players, enemies, the world takes) are made up of polygons, lots of little squares. The more polygons that are used to make a model, the higher amount of detail a model has the capability of having, however, more polys = more things for the hardware to calculate. A skilled artist here will look to optimize models by removing unnecessary polygons, i.e polygons that will never face the player like the backs of buildings on a street.
Textures are simply images, so think JPGs, PNGs, TGRs, etc. A single model may used a lot of different textures compiled together into a Material. But like with Polys on a Model, a higher resolution Texture while offering the capability of more detail, also increases the file size and the strain on the hardware.
Sounds are much the same, bit instead with Bitrate. Higher Bitrate = increased capacity for higher quality sound, but also is more strenuous on the hardware.
This same logic applies to all elements within a game, but also to things like whether or not LODs are being used properly (which loads a lower-poly and lower-material-resolution model when far away from something instead of the high-poly high-resolution one), or if render culling (which only shows elements of the world when the player is in certain areas and keeps them hidden otherwise), or many other things.
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