What does optimization mean when referring to game size?

Question

I feel like “optimization” gets thrown around as a buzz word when talking about supposed unnecessarily large game sizes, like the upcoming Mortal Kombat. But what does it actually mean for a game to be optimized? Or how can it be done?

In: 0

Answer 1

The real question is “Optimized for *what*?

Usually in games it means optimized for performance. This can mean any number of things, like figuring out which parts of the models you can cull without impacting graphics too much — simpler models mean faster rendering.

It can also mean simplifying various aspects of the games physics or using clever tricks that are computationally easy to do but give complex results. One of my favorite examples of this is the “fast inverse square root” which is/was used for calculating reflections. Normally finding the inverse of a square root is incredibly computationally expensive because finding the square root of a number is incredibly computationally expensive but the technique instead uses weird bit-level manipulation techniques and a pre-calculated constant (a value that doesn’t change while the game is running) to give a pretty good estimate of what the answer should be but at a bare fraction of the cost of actually calculating the answer.

There are other ways a game could be optimized, such as detecting specific hardware and changing how certain things are done when that hardware is present (or not) because that hardware is really good at some things and not so much at others. It could even mean changing the order of when things are loaded into memory so it’s faster to access or does big things when not much is going on in the game so you don’t notice any slowdowns. For example, a lot of games hide enemies outside of the bounds of the map so when they “spawn in” they’re actually just moved, that way the game doesn’t have to load anything during the spawn in process which might cause a framerate hiccup in the middle of a fight.

So what does it mean for a game to be optimized? Ultimately it means that things have been changed so that the game does whatever it’s trying to do better than it did before, possibly at the cost of other things which are less important or that typical player won’t even notice.