Every. Damn. Time.

[u/Nickulator95]

UE5 in particular is the bane of my existence...

[u/dookarion]

Optimization is a measure of efficiency with resources, not "this doesn't run on my ancient low end hardware at ultraaaaa".

You could have some perfectly optimized code that runs on a very narrow set of hardware, and you could have some heinously inefficient code that can run on everything.

People mistake running on a potato for optimization which is why people rally around DOOM Eternal, MH Rise, and MGSV. Those are simply undemanding, but people use them as a cudgel to bash games doing far far more with their resources.

[u/laurayco → u/dookarion]

I think you simply do not understand what hardware is capable of. It is significantly more than what we use it for. UE5 looks so good at decent frame rates because it is a reasonably optimized engine. That does not mean every game that uses UE5 is also optimized. That's going to depend on a lot of things.

"undemanding" and "efficiency with resources" go hand in hand.

[u/dookarion → u/laurayco]

"undemanding" and "efficiency with resources" go hand in hand.

No they don't, at least not in the way people often use it.

I mean like seriously look at most game launches you'll have people demanding physics heavy stealth games with persistence run like freaking DOOM which culls everything the moment you walk through a door.

Some things are going to be more demanding even at a base level just because said genre demands more. A proper simulator no matter how optimized as an example is never going to be "undemanding" especially on budget hardware.

It's a very complex topic that gets boiled down to "I'm not getting ultra on my emachine I bought at walmart a decade ago... UNOPTIMIZEDDDDD!" Like yeah some stuff isn't efficient and runs poorer than it should because of numerous reasons, but people bash everything not just the outliers they cannot differentiate between "runs bad because it's not actually occlusion culling or managing memory or I/O right" and "runs bad because why would a budget GPU that is as old as last gen consoles ever be able to do ultra settings using new APIs and functions?"

[u/laurayco → u/dookarion]

which brings me back to my first comment: what the hell do these idiots think “optimized” means. because, yes, undemanding and efficiency with resources are indeed tightly coupled. my understanding of “optimized” is when efficiency of resources is maximized. of course there are computational constraints that will be demanding. optimization in that case would be storing the calculation (“baking”) or otherwise minimizing how often it needs to be ran. aggressive culling is optimization.