I get the concept of why graphically intensive games cause lag and overheat, but I don’t get why some games (such as Minecraft) or minimalist graphic style games still cause lag on average computers?
In: Technology
Graphics isn’t the only bottleneck, and while graphics commonly are an issue heavy logical processing (such as games that have many AI characters acting at once) or games with a lot of asset processing can just as easily bog down a system.
Minecraft isn’t even all that graphically unimpressive. Sure, the textures aren’t much to think of, but these aren’t static landscapes. Each block in Minecraft can be destroyed, replaced, and can interact with the player. Minecraft does a lot of processing in the background to discover what is and isn’t relevant to the player and hide the rest or merge it in to a single “unit” that can be treated as a single entity. Add on that Minecraft is written in Java which is a fairly slow language for this kind of processing and it’s not all that surprising that Minecraft is a bit demanding.
The minimalist graphic style game may be doing a lot of processing in the background that you simply can not see or notice, or they may be poorly optimized.
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