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

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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. “*

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25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, computers come with different hardware. And not just PCs, either. Even the same console can come with different hardware iterations. And each of them may work a little differently.

When talking about optimization, what is meant is that the game is programmed to run on a specific hardware setup. For instance, one processor model might be a bit faster calculting things one way instead of the other. During optimization, you would program the game to use the faster way, in so far as doing so is possible. This improves performance.

When a game is poorly optimized, what people mean is that it performs poorly because steps like what i described above have not or only barely been taken.

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