The question comes from comments I’ve read regarding games like ‘Gotham Knights’ and ‘Plague Tale Requiem’ where people are saying the game could have run at higher FPS than it does on PS5 or XBX if it was properly optimised for the consoles.
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Analogy:
How do people multiply two numbers? Well there’s a bunch of different methods you can use. You might have that particular multiplication problem memorized, so you just remember the answer. You might do the long multiplication method. You might do repeated addition. You might turn the problem into a difference of squares problem and do it that way instead (for very specific problems where that’s easier).
They all get the right answer, but may take different amounts of time depending on the method and person, and some people (like kids who haven’t learned long multiplication) might not be able to do some methods. Additionally, some multiplications (like pi times e) can’t be done with some methods (like repeated addition).
Computer hardware has a similar thing where different actions may have different ways to accomplish them that may be more or less general and take more or less time, and different sets of hardware may be able to do only some methods.
End of analogy.
When writing a program, you usually ignore all of this and just tell the hardware what tasks to do to get the job done and let another program worry about the details of interacting with the hardware. But if you really care about speed and know what hardware you have, you can look at all of the different ways the hardware can do what you want to do and see what is fastest on that hardware. Sometimes you can come up with weird tricks that use specific quirks of the hardware to get more speed, too. If you do these for a lot of things your program does, the small speed differences can really add up.
Video games in particular have a few more broad things that can be adjusted based on the hardware like frame rate and resolution. If a specific console can only ever output at a certain resolution, then there’s no point doing all of the work to render the game at a higher resolution only to throw most of that work out. Instead you could simplify the process right from the start and do a fraction of the work for the same result. A similar process applies to frame rate: why rush to process a frame in a 120th of a second if you can only output a frame every 30th of a second? Take your time and make those fewer frames look good.
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