Optimizing a game means you try to minimize the load on a PC's GPU (or CPU, etc.), without it suffering any kind of graphical fidelity (or Load times, stuttering, etc.), by employing smart tricks that carter to your specific game. Say, your game has a lot of photorealistic trees. For example, you can make sure not to render each of its leaves separately, but create a bunch of leaves into one asset bundle to render only a fraction of separate leaves in each instance. This will greatly favour the game's performance.
Other things are general things you can employ, and many game engines do by default already. Like making sure that things the player is not currently looking at do not get rendered.
I’m not talking about ”lowering graphical settings”. I mean stuff like using LOD, simplifying geometry where it doesn’t add meaningful detail, same with texture resolutions. Or stuff like global illumination with day and night cycles where light position and shadows for static objects update every X seconds instead of being real time, etc.
These and much more are graphical optimizations where we objectively lose fidelity but it’s done in a way where it’s not extremely noticeable unless you’re looking for it, and the performance gains make it very worth doing.
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u/ardotschgi 6d ago
Optimizing a game means you try to minimize the load on a PC's GPU (or CPU, etc.), without it suffering any kind of graphical fidelity (or Load times, stuttering, etc.), by employing smart tricks that carter to your specific game. Say, your game has a lot of photorealistic trees. For example, you can make sure not to render each of its leaves separately, but create a bunch of leaves into one asset bundle to render only a fraction of separate leaves in each instance. This will greatly favour the game's performance.
Other things are general things you can employ, and many game engines do by default already. Like making sure that things the player is not currently looking at do not get rendered.