In regards to gaming, what is “optimization”?

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If consoles are just glorified PCs now, how is it that a game designed for PS5 or X-Box Series X alone better than one that is designed to be cross platform?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

1. Games are made on a deadline. So you only have a certain amount of time to make/polish/ship the game.
2. You have a limited budget, so you only have a certain amount of people hired to complete step 1.
3. When you make the game cross-platform, you need to devote more of your limited resources (time+people) to two separate versions of the game.
4. This results in less time/effort put into optimizing the game if there are multiple versions.
5. Hardware differences matter. If you have a Xbox One and Xbox Series X versions of a game, the “One” version needs to run well off a harddrive, vs. the Series X’s SSD. These each require their own optimizations that are different, and the hard drive version will always be slower due to the slower hardware.
6. PCs have a BROAD range of hardware in them, and you have to support a lot of it, so thats a lot more complex optimizations over a Xbox Series X, which has just one configuration.

Anonymous 0 Comments

ELI5 oversimplification.

For example you have a excel sheet with a 10 thousand rows. you need to find a row.

You can go at from the beginning, going over each line until you find it. Or you can create an index with important data and the line number, that index is easier to go trough than the big sheet.

This is indexing, one form of optimization. Mostly done in databases, but the principle is sound, making things easier to be accessed.

Other thing is that it is hard to know “what comes next” when you are in the process of making. But when you are complete, you can “streamline” things, you know what comes next, what is happening now, so you can preload specific images, sounds and events instead of having everything loaded.

Also an example for Apple devices and Apple software or gaming consoles. If you know your hardware you can use specific language while you make your program, known that to be fast on that hardware.

Making your program run on every possible hardware gives overhead on your program, since it has to “translate” to different hardwares.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In simple terms, optimization is just making things run better (faster, use less memory…).

In regards to your specific platform question, it means that the program (the game) is written to use some special feature of the hardware that one console has and another does not.

This isn’t just specific to consoles like Xbox or Playstation. There are features that Intel processors have that AMD processors do not. You could even optimize games for a specific Intel processor. But you don’t want to do that, since you don’t know what computer the game is going to be running on, so you want to make it so that it runs on as many as possible. This is referred to in software engineering as “portable code”. But if you know the game is going to be only running on this specific Xbox, you can optimize for it.

You could write the games in such a way that it’s optimized for multiple platforms, under specific circumstances. But that is a lot of work, and in some cases, would be hard to do without exposing the soource code and making the installation process *very* long.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cause consoles are not “glorified PCs”. The hardware is designed specifically for “gaming tasks”. PCs doesn’t have custom controllers for reading from storage and hardware unpacking on the fly to the best ram portion, or maybe directly to the vram. Just for doing a (non technical) example.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s a famous saying in software engineering: “Make it work, make it right, make it fast”. Optimisation is, basically, the “make it fast” step. Get all the performance you can out of it.

Some of the optimisation work is more or less universal: Do the least work possible (don’t repeat work, don’t do work you don’t need to), and be as efficient as possible with the work you do end up doing.

When you talk about “optimised for XBox/PS5” stuff, it’s a bit different. PCs come in a wide variety of hardware configurations (all sorts of graphics cards, processors, memory) so you account for all of those things. On the console front, you have only two versions of the Xbox Series X/S, and one version of the PS5. That means you can account for their precise performance characteristics.

Is your CPU sitting idle while the GPU is going full throttle while struggling to keep up? Perhaps you can move some of the work from the GPU to the CPU. Is your CPU working hard while your RAM is unused? Maybe pre-calculate a bunch of stuff and store it in RAM so you can reuse it instead of recalculating it every frame. That sort of thing.

[This talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDhKyIZd3O8) by one of the guys at Insomniac talks _a lot_ about optimisation in the Spiderman game for the PS4. It’s pretty technical, but it should still give you a good idea of what optimisation work looks like.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Optimization is the process in which a game is made to run more smoothly. It is an umbrella terms but in general, it means to improve loading times, frames per seconds. Responses to input and rendering output of other sources in game.

This could be via clever coding or simply having more ram. Reducing textures quality or having less models on screen at any given time. It is a very long and difficult process since most gains are marginal and it takes many Optimizations to make it run significantly better

A bit beyond the questions but There is no way ps5 or Xbox is anywhere near a glorified PC. PCs are significantly different. U can not do office work on a ps5 for example.
If anything consoles are specialized gaming devices. But due to one console being more or less exactly the same they can optimize easier because they know the system limits. Pc are harder because each pc could be very different

Anonymous 0 Comments

Generally optimising simply means trying to get the same result with less resources, in computing those resources will mostly be compute time or memory storage.

But if you’re specifically talking about optimisation of consoles vs PC’s then what’s happening is that the overall optimisation problem for a console is simpler than the one for PC’s.

Any given PC could be built with a wide variety of different components, of varying capabilities and ages, so when trying to optimise a PC game you need to consider all those possibilities, whereas on a console you know exactly what the hardware it will have, and what resources are going to be available, so you can focus more on optimising the game and less on optimising the compatibility.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A PC is designed to do many different things from search the internet to watch movies to play games to do work. A console is designed to play games and that’s it. Modern consoles have some bonus features like watching movies, but those are afterthoughts. Thus, consoles are better suited for games because that’s their main purpose, just like a Uhaul is better suited for moving personal belongings than your average car.

Another thing that’s particularly important here is that the games themselves are developed specifically to run on the console’s hardware. This allows them to optimize for performance much more than on PC, because they know exactly what hardware they will be running on, and so they can write all of the code for their game in a way that best takes advantage of the strengths and features of that hardware. Compare this to PC games, which need to contend with such questions as: “What operating system am I running on?” “How much RAM do I have?” “Do I have access to a graphics card and what model?” It makes it way harder to design the code to run well in every possible environment.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Optimizing just means doing things in the most efficient or effective way.

A PC, an XBOX, and a Playstation have a lot in common, and also a lot of differences. The more work the developers put into making optimal differences for each platform, the more well suited the final result will be for the platform.

Think about how the graphic settings you use to run an intense PC game on your PC may be different than the ones I use on my PC. We have both separately found an optimal solution for our hardware. Conceptually this is what it means when a game is optimized for different platforms. They’re making similar changes with a very high degree of complexity and intricacy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

More efficient hardware calls and software blocks to reduce latency, more modular coding and resource priority to reduce ram, etc