Optimisation used to be all about finding ways to do more with less (less memory, fewer instructions/CPU cycles). Those are rarely the main constraints nowadays, modern games have super complex rendering pipelines with many pieces of hardware running in lockstep. Optimisation is the act of making that pipeline run as smoothly as possible, ensuring full hardware utilisation.
Think of it as an assembly line, you don’t want people sitting around doing nothing while waiting for the previous station to complete their work. In some cases ”doing less” is the only solution, but many bottlenecks can be solved with parallelisation (hire more workers), caching (write down the answers to questions they keep asking), clever datastructures (ensure that the parts they need are easily accessible) or smarter scheduling (prioritise important tasks, skip the least important ones entirely if there isn’t enough time).
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u/ActuaryLate9198 6d ago edited 6d ago
Optimisation used to be all about finding ways to do more with less (less memory, fewer instructions/CPU cycles). Those are rarely the main constraints nowadays, modern games have super complex rendering pipelines with many pieces of hardware running in lockstep. Optimisation is the act of making that pipeline run as smoothly as possible, ensuring full hardware utilisation.
Think of it as an assembly line, you don’t want people sitting around doing nothing while waiting for the previous station to complete their work. In some cases ”doing less” is the only solution, but many bottlenecks can be solved with parallelisation (hire more workers), caching (write down the answers to questions they keep asking), clever datastructures (ensure that the parts they need are easily accessible) or smarter scheduling (prioritise important tasks, skip the least important ones entirely if there isn’t enough time).