Optimization involves a lot of things. For example off-loading off-screen stuff, improving multithreading npc path-finding and other stuff using too much cpu cicles without any gain in quality. All these things could go under-radar if you test on hi-tier rig which may not get impact by these but of course increase cpu usage for, again, no gain at all. This of course heats hardware too.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 days ago
You count specific optimization strategies that affect everyone. But not all optmizations or in the case of our discussion, making the game run on Steam Deck, won’t affect everyone.
MrSoup@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Indeed making the game run on Steam Deck involve more than optimization, like gamepad support and a proper UI scale (other than wine or linux friendly anti-cheat) which are beneficial not to EVERYONE but to what I think still a big piece of the cake.
What I was doin was speculating on optimization, which indeed is beneficial to everyone.
Being pushed to target a specific frame rate on a mid or low range device make you more aware of possible bottlenecks and things that can just be improved.
Lately there are a lot of studios who just don’t care because they expect you to have an hi-tier rig (or because they use it to test their own game, resulting in good enough fps), so you end up in simple scenes which use 100% of Gpu or whatever just because the engine is doing something in background actually useless. But since you must be running this on a powerfull pc, that still means enough fps. This leads to bad design choices, which is also the trend with not so savvy unreal engine developers.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 days ago
But its not true in all cases. Let’s say a game is vastly optimized to run on high end hardware. There is not much to do, but they can optimize to run it on low end hardware with low resolution textures and other settings to make the game run on handheld. This would be optimized for handheld. And it won’t change how good the game run on high end already.
MrSoup@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Of course when we talk about mipmaps, lower resolution textures, lod, or other technics to improve lower end gpus usability, the gains are more toward those lower ends. That’s granted, even because in that field optimization is more up to drivers and the engine itself rather than the studio (given they are not using an homemade engine).
Talking about other optimization, like cpu usage, again yes: results can be various, given not every cpus are the same. Lower ends commonly are faster in single threading rather than high ends which outperform in multi threading.
Ram usage too. Having the game more smartly using it would avoid issues, but still if your rig got soooo many GBs of ram, you can even load the full game inside lol (I know people having 128GB, mind blowing).
If you by everyone, you mean it. Like 100% of gamers, of course it’s not. One can play on the Frontier on all max-out settings.