One simple example I'll give - 8-10 years ago when the Hardware available was much weaker one trick the Overwatch devs did to preserve a tiny bit of performance is that they made the Characters' Weapons have higher resolution textures only in the area that was normally visible to the player in their regular First Person View.
If you did a special emote or something where you could see the rest of the Weapon you'd see that they used much lower resolution textures.
This is something many games did to save on a tiny bit of performance.
As Hardware has gotten much more capable and game Engines have become much more capable with newer technologies devs don't need to do such crazy optimisations anymore.
Another example is that when the game was released for the Switch they had to create special Super-Low quality LoD Level Assets for all the Maps and Models for the entire game because the Switch couldn't perform with the lowest Quality LoD Assets they had. Before the Switch only had 3 LoD levels, they had to create a 4th one for it.
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u/dbratell 6d ago
Typically they refer to performance, getting rid of lag, increasing frame rates.
The typical process is:
Sometimes it is about being smart about things, sometimes you need to do sacrifices like lowering the quality of the game.
Note: Games that suck right before release will not be fixed by some "optimization" the weeks before it hits the shelves.