Ask HN: Game devs, how do you approach optimization? What would make it better?
Game devs, how do you ensure your game performs well across your player base? By perform well, I mean achieving consistent frame rates and reasonable load times (and free of other technical issues).
Obviously, there are ways to measure and debug these things in a development environment (profilers, NSight, RenderDoc). But how do you gain confidence things are working well in the wild with diverse hardware setups?
I'm thinking about starting a project to help track and measure these types of issues -- sort of like Sentry.io for game performance.
Some pain points I’ve heard and experienced myself: - Game performance is assessed too late in the development cycle - Getting data from a wide range of devices is time consuming - Difficulty enforcing art budgets and performance standards across the team - Challenges identifying the root cause of slow-downs based on player reports - Limited data
How are you handling performance debugging and optimization? What’s missing and how would your dream tool improve this? This is a bit topical for me. Game performance seems to be a real problem as of late... It’s not uncommon for me to play “retro” games that run poorly on my 4-series Nvidia gpu. Not a game developer myself but this is definitely still a problem in 2025. Yes, same experience. I recently played a "Wolfenstein" clone that frequently dipped into the the 30-60 fps range on my 3080. The original Wolfenstein used to run on a 386 if I'm not mistaken.