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PC speed gains erased by modern software
(hackaday.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Games are far from the worst examples of this. Largely games are still very high performance. Some lax policies on sizes are not the norm, most data is large because it’s just high detail.
The real losses are simple desktop apps being entire web engines.
Games are definitely not very well optimised. For one, most indie publishers are artists rather than software developers, which means that they do not have the technical expertise to properly program their applications, especially on the OpenGL/Vulkan/Direct3D side of things. Large video game corporations, in contrast, are indeed quite capable of reducing the hardware requirements and increasing the performance of their games, but they are often not willing, as became particularly evident recently with Jedi: Survivor, where a major public outcry was required for them to fix the game's performance problems, which they have done quite competently.
Most indie 3D games are not programmed from scratch, working directly with Vulkan, OpenGL, etc. Instead, they’re using a licensed game engine like Unreal. A lot of AAA game houses didn’t like the game engine license fees eating into profit margins so they came up with their own engines that they maintain internally with varying levels of success.