Optimization Memes

Nothing hits harder than a positive review on Christmas morning from someone who literally can't run your game. Posted at 12:27am on December 25th with "Product refunded" stamped on it like a death certificate. They played for 18 minutes total, their PC gave up the ghost, and instead of leaving a salty one-star rant about optimization, they still gave it a thumbs up because the YouTube gameplay looked fun. That's the digital equivalent of saying "the restaurant smells amazing" while being wheeled out on a stretcher from food poisoning. This is either the most wholesome gamer ever or someone whose hardware specs include a hamster wheel and prayers. Either way, this dev just got the most bittersweet recommendation of their career.

Unreal Engine out here acting like your helicopter parent, telling you your beast of a machine with an RTX 5090 and 14900KF isn't good enough to run at 1440p 60fps because it insists on strangling everything through a single thread. Meanwhile, id Tech Engine is the cool uncle who shows up and says "use ALL the cores, kid" and delivers billion FPS on a toaster. The difference? id Software actually knows how to write multithreaded code that doesn't make your CPU cry. They've been optimizing game engines since Carmack was writing assembly in his sleep. Unreal just keeps adding more AI-upscaling band-aids instead of fixing the fundamental performance issues. It's 2024 and we're still dealing with engines that can't properly utilize modern hardware. id Tech proves it's possible, but everyone else would rather blame your GPU than admit their engine is running like it's 2005.

Back in the day, game devs were out here coding ENTIRE ROLLERCOASTER TYCOONS in Assembly language like absolute psychopaths, fitting shooters into 97KB (yes, KILOBYTES), and somehow making games run on potatoes while also having bodies that could bench press a small car. They were built different, both literally and figuratively. Fast forward to now and we've got AAA studios crying about how they can't fix bugs because someone's allegedly stealing breast milk (?!), shipping 50GB games that require another 50GB day-one patch, telling you to buy a NASA-grade PC just so their unoptimized mess doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and blaming YOU—the player—for their always-online singleplayer game being broken. The devolution is REAL and it's SPECTACULAR in the worst way possible. We went from "I made this masterpiece fit on a floppy disk" to "Sorry, the game is 200GB and still doesn't work, also here's $70 worth of microtransactions." The bar went from the moon straight to the Earth's core.