A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Define "optimisation". Perhaps this is just a failure of my imagination, but every "optimisation" that I can think of comes at the cost of quality - let's talk about that.

Animations can certainly be compressed - when dealing with rigs that are animated with forward kinematics, those optimisations come at the cost of jitter which is increasibly noticeable as render resolutions go up.

Textures can be optimised by running them through compression schemes like DXT1, DXT5, BC6 or BC7 - but you'd better hope that those textures don't need hard edges or otherwise require fine details, because the block compression utilised by all of the above will kill quality.

Audio tracks can be compressed, at the cost of noticeable levels of hiss or atrocious levels of frequency response, which is particularly unforgivable given the number of gamers who use headsets these days.

The simple fact is that the demand for quality assets has increased, while gamers' ability to visualize these assets at the intended quality has increased commensurately as well, leading to double the motivation to avoid lossy compression, and increase asset size.

As much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, it isn't 2001 anymore, and the average particle system won't look particularly compelling with PS2-era texture resolutions and polygon counts. But fortunately, we don't live in that world anymore, constrained by 32 meg of RAM.

I hate to sound flippant - I do - but you need to consider the fact that even a mid-range graphics card these days has multiple gigabytes of VRAM, which directly translates to multiple gigabytes of assets - for *one* *scene*. How many scenes does an average epic title have?

As hardware capacity increases, software demands increase to fill capacity. That's the world we live in. That's the world we've lived in for decades. But people not involved in the creation of such software decry "wasteful" use of resources without having the full context.