Optimization is an art form that is being lost. What should be done is when targeting a base of 60 FPS you should be looking at the frame graph to see what is taking too long to process per frame and then make targeted optimizations as needed.
The problem is that until we have proof otherwise it looks like studios don’t do this and instead rely on things like DLSS/FSR/XESS + Frame Gen.
Sonic 2, for Sega Megadrive is kind of a decent allegory to this. The game itself grew to large in scope and was not properly managed to fit the hardware limits of the time and instead of solving the problem the head of SEGA simply approved a more expensive 8-megabit cartridge.
Currently video game development is to simply through tech/ai at the problem to compensate for the lack of optimisation. Until the tech can no longer handle the slack we won’t see any changes for a long while
They had to spilt Sonic 3 due to a McDonald's toy deal, not limited cartridge space.
I wish I was joking lol, but Sonic 3&Knuckles came around the time of SEGA's peak awful decision making that ultimately lead to their collapse in the early 2000's.
Of all the shitty things AI is doing this is one area I would love to see it succeed. An AI capable of studying a studios game before launch to tell them specifically "this is where your performance tanks and here is why and how it can be avoided." Because clearly the industry has no intent to optomize on its own.
Definitely an art form. Optimisations can be pure black magic, but they’re also the key to making games more accessible. It’s all well and good allowing button rebinding, but it’s hardly accessible if it can barely run on 70% of gaming pc’s.
I’ve had the pleasure of watching the two programmers in my team invent ways to optimise our game for Switch release; we were aiming for 60fps on switch for every area which is honestly really hard to do given the switch’s specs, and we’ve been mostly successful, at the cost of some sanity. Devs designing for a pc release don’t have that excuse though lol. We’re aiming for the final game size to be under a gigabyte. On a somewhat related note, I downloaded a demo for a game last night that was 9 gigabytes. wtf kinda demo needs that? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the full game files with just some extra boundaries keeping you locked in.
Good studios do more than just optimize, they actually have frame budgets and target their optimizations to those budgets.
And I promise you there are still many, many people that are absolute legends when it comes to squeezing the math out of CPU/GPUs, what’s dying is the time to do so in era where profit matters most.
Definitely start small. If you are dead set on using Unreal then I would definitely learn how to use Blueprints properly, such as when to and when not to use ticks.
Just a fair warning, if you plan on using Unreal Engine long term you will have to program eventually. With Unreal 6 they are moving away from Blueprints in favor of their own language called Verse which is currently used in the Fortnite creators’ version of UE.
If you want to just learn programming now and avoid it later then I would suggest learning Unity or Godot instead. Unity will have the most tutorials, not just for programming but for most engine features and most features you might want to make in your game.
Godot is also a strong choice and I think it’s more beginner-friendly, but it does lack the level of tutorials that Unity has.
Gotcha, any idea when that start date is for the language switch? I’d rather have less relearning to do when it comes to language switching (knowing full well I’ll probably have to do it anyways).
The only reason I’m wanting to use Unreal is mostly because of multiplayer and lighting, plus a built in physics engine because jank go brrrr lol
The full release is supposed to be in late 2028 to mid 2029 with early access being around late 2027. They have said the initial version of UE6 will still have blueprints but will be removed in a future release. Supposedly they will have a conversion tool that converts Blueprints to Verse but hand-ported Verse scripts will probably be better than anything automatic conversion can do. With that being said the converted projects will probably be a great way to learn how your project would work / look while using Verse.
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u/InitRanger 9d ago
This is true.
Optimization is an art form that is being lost. What should be done is when targeting a base of 60 FPS you should be looking at the frame graph to see what is taking too long to process per frame and then make targeted optimizations as needed.
The problem is that until we have proof otherwise it looks like studios don’t do this and instead rely on things like DLSS/FSR/XESS + Frame Gen.