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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#ELI5
*(This is an analogy, not precise!)*
Every platform has an instruction set. The instruction set includes things like:
* Draw a box
* Draw a circle
* Draw a line
* Change the color of this dot, etc….
The game itself (ex: Gotham Knights) knows each platform, and each platform’s instruction set. The game tells the platform “Draw a Line” to draw a line from one point to another.
So different platforms have different instructions that do the same thing (draw a line), and a single game knows how to call those instructions on each platform.
But let’s say that the Nintendo Switch has an extra instruction, called “Draw A Line Super Duper Fast”.
Some games don’t bother with that instruction. The game says, “Just call the normal Draw-a-Line function, the same way you do it on all other platforms”.
That game doesn’t even bother to check if there’s a “Draw a Line Super Duper Fast” instruction in the first place!
So the line still gets drawn, but more slowly than it could have been drawn.
**OPTIMIZING for a specific platform means the game designer took extra special care to look for platform-specific ways to make the game run faster or look better.**
Does that help?
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