I think this is some mythical game programmer you have in mind because, having worked in a few AAA/AA games myself, i can clearly tell you that the overwhelming majority of programmers - including engine programmers - rarely think about any of that.

Sure, someone might occasionally pull out a profiler, but only if things start becoming visibly bad. But this is an exceptional situation, not the norm.

On the other hand, game engines are constantly engineered with features that go against performance: interpreted scripting languages, ad-hoc garbage collectors (for assets, not only for scripts), visual material editors[0], deep object oriented hierarchies with FAT objects (hello Unreal Engine), etc.

[0] Shader compilation stutter is something a lot of gamers notice and dislike and a common explanation for its existence is the number and complexity of shaders current games use. But one thing very few seem to notice is this is only the case in engines that allow designers/artists to create materials with visual editors that generate shaders without understanding the implications. In engines that do not allow that (such as current id Tech) and artist have to create their materials using a low number of predefined shaders you rarely hear about this issue.

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dahart 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I suspect you’re referring to a gameplay programmer as opposed to a game engine programmer, even though your claim includes engine devs. There are more gameplay devs than engine devs, and gameplay devs will think about perf less and use a profiler less often.

I worked at the intersection of engine and gameplay for a decade, and I’ve personally never seen an engine dev who doesn’t use a profiler nearly every day, and I certainly did. If you watch game dev presentations at conferences (Siggraph, GDC, etc.) you will generally see profile-driven development for new engine tech, they use profilers heavily and monitor performance rigorously.

	▲	badsectoracula a day ago \| parent [-]
		I worked on engine and tools, not gameplay, though obviously i also did interact with gameplay programmers too, though most of my work was on engine side. Yes, relatively speaking, gameplay devs did think about performance less but that is on a relative scale - engine programmers also didn't think of it as much as implied. Sure people did use profilers and the engine did have various profiling views and i personally wrote some of them myself - both for profiling performance as well as I/O since for some time i also worked on loading/streaming too - but as i wrote, those were when things became visibly bad. Most of the time people were either busy trying to fix bugs or busy trying to implement new features - and optimizing them became something to care about later, if needed (and there was enough time). And TBH usually that was fine - at some point i found some big inefficiency in one of the engine's core data structures, but that same engine was already used for a well received game at the past and the inefficiency only became obvious because the current (at the time) game was several times larger. So the thing performed fine for the original requirements and, at the time, trying to do more would be a waste (after all, it wasn't until long after the original game the engine was made for was released that the decision to make a much larger one was made).

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qingcharles 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yikes. I lived inside the profiler when I was a gamedev, but that was many, many years ago. Probably spent more time trying to eke out performance than I did writing new features, sadly.

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bentt 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You must have been working on a genre that wasnt perf sensitive.

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lifeformed 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It just depends on if you're doing coding on the lower levels or scripting gameplay features. One is a lot more focused on optimization then the other.

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badsectoracula 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been working on FPSs and ARPGs, which AFAIK are among the more perf sensitive genres, at least as far as mainstream genres go.

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bentt 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Huh I am surprised perf wasnt more of a focus. Maybe the art style was intentionally keeping things hardware friendly?

	▲	badsectoracula a day ago \| parent [-]
		The art style was your regular 'realistic' one that most AA/AAA games use, though even if it wasn't it wouldn't make much of a difference - some art styled enable you to make more out of the hardware, but they do not provide better performance automatically (if anything, if done naively a non-photorealistic art style can actually be worse).

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Rohansi 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

More performance sensitive but also more constrained. Balances out as long as you're not doing anything silly.