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

A poorly optimized game is one that runs poorly and does not take advantage of the hardware.

The game (or any software) should be designed with the hardware in mind. For example let’s say a game has 2 levels. You can only play one level at a time. It would be very wasteful to load both levels at the same time when only one level is being used. So games will load only what they need.

A poorly optimized game would load all the levels at once which would use up all your resources.

In terms of how you optimize it’s like asking “how do I clean a house”. There’s a lot of things that can be done. Some big some small.

For example. If you have a scene in a game where there’s lots of enemies. Like an angry mob. Games will often put the very detailed enemy models at the front of the mob. But the ones at the back will be low resolution, and lack detail. This is because they know the player is not allowed to go back that far. They won’t notice that the far away ones don’t look as good.

This video series shows off some of these ideas without going into game design itself. https://youtube.com/@BoundaryBreak?si=lkRU1ngsFKBwx-n3