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
Poorly optimized means it consumes way more resources than it should have been given the resulting visual appearance.
Optimizing a game on older hardware was proper computer science, how to achieve same or similar effects with much less computational overhead is not one question, but thousands of them added together, don’t expect an eli5 answer on this, it probably needs PhD in both computer science and applied mathematics.
Optimizing on modern hardware is much easier because ground work has been done by those PhDs in game engines, just tune the graphics settings to find a sweetspot between visual effects and framerate.
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