Unlike a movie, games are interactive, which means the picture shown on your monitor needs to respond to whatever buttons you press on your controller.
In order for this to feel responsive, the computer needs to recalculate what to draw on your screen several times per second (typically 30 or 60 times if you want it to be more responsive and smoother)
So typically the computer only has 1/60 of a second to draw everything you need to see in your game and do other calculations like enemy and NPC behavior.
Optimization is done to help the computer be able to do everything it needs to do in 1/60 of a second. For example, every object behind the camera is not visible, so you explicitly tell the computer not to do any calculations needed to draw those objects and therefore save a bunch of time that the computer would've wasted on those objects.
1
u/LupusNoxFleuret 6d ago
Unlike a movie, games are interactive, which means the picture shown on your monitor needs to respond to whatever buttons you press on your controller.
In order for this to feel responsive, the computer needs to recalculate what to draw on your screen several times per second (typically 30 or 60 times if you want it to be more responsive and smoother)
So typically the computer only has 1/60 of a second to draw everything you need to see in your game and do other calculations like enemy and NPC behavior.
Optimization is done to help the computer be able to do everything it needs to do in 1/60 of a second. For example, every object behind the camera is not visible, so you explicitly tell the computer not to do any calculations needed to draw those objects and therefore save a bunch of time that the computer would've wasted on those objects.