One of the most common trends influenced by video game consoles is the remasters of old titles. Normally created for a technically superior console and, therefore, of a later generation. Well, many of them also come to the PC and are used to optimize games new systems that users have at home.
No application uses 100% of what our hardware can provide, so when we talk about performing an optimization, we are talking about increasing the amount of resources used in order to achieve a better result in the eyes of the user. In the case of a game, it might mean getting better visual quality and a higher frame rate. However, this not only means aesthetic changes, but also in the code itself in order to get closer to that 100%.
There are many poorly optimized games on PC
The main reason why games should have optimization every few years is not just to make them look better and updated, but for the fact that their code should be optimized, especially for the fact that when many titles appeared, many of the features we now give as already given were either new at the time or years away from appearing.
This is especially true for titles released during the DirectX 9 era, where having a dual-core processor was the norm and if you had a quad-core you were privileged. All you have to do is browse through a good chunk of the collection of classics on Steam released around this time and check out, after running them on your most modern PC, how the game itself distributes its processes. on processor cores is, to say the least, inefficient. The reason? Back then nobody had 6 or 8 core systems and optimizing a game for something that doesn’t exist is a waste of time.
Why optimizing games for more cores gives more performance?
For this we need to understand Amdahl’s law, which marks the level of improvement that a program can have if its work is parallelized, which is nothing more than applying the division of labor and making the various processes that are part of an application are distributed among the various execution threads and processor cores. So in the end, instead of having a very busy part of the CPU, we will have several that will be less busy.
In the end, this means that the game, or any other application, can solve its tasks faster. The thing is, it’s crucial to get a higher frame rate by reducing the time the CPU spends preparing each frame. Of course, if we are talking about very old titles, it means touching the source code of the game so that they adapt much better to the most modern systems that people have at home.
Currently the most used API in games is DirectX 12, instead of generating a single list of screens or CPU commands to send to the graphics card, it creates multiple ones using multiple CPU cores. This is one of the most common ways to optimize older, more common games. Especially when a conversion from the current remaster to the PC is done.