Game Performance Optimization: Proven Tips to Improve Mobile Gameplay

Today, players expect the best visual, gameplay, and story quality in their video games. Despite huge technological advances, games still suffer from shoddy graphics, lagging, and long loading times. This is a recipe for frustration, negative reviews, and high player churn. Moral of the story? If you don’t have a routine game optimization protocol, you risk shrinking your audience and your revenue.

By cluing up on common game performance metrics and optimization strategies, your game is guaranteed to run smoother. Let’s run through some game optimization fundamentals and which functions and techniques could be most relevant for you.

What is game optimization?

Game optimization is the process of making a video game run at the highest level of quality possible. This requires numerous changes and improvements while minimizing how many resources it uses. Various game aspects can be optimized, including loading times, graphics, and memory usage.

When optimizing games, developers must understand their code and the platforms they’re played and built on. These include console and mobile, as well as PC and game engines.

Why is it important to optimize games?

Game optimization is essential at every stage of a game development cycle. Here are some reasons why:

• Attracting a wide audience: The better optimized a game is, the wider variety of gamers are going to want to play.
• User experience: Developers want their games to have the highest level of playability possible. The better the game performance, the better the user experience will be. 
• Player retention: The fewer load and lag time issues a game has, the more likely players will keep playing your game. The fact that mobile games have a retention rate (RR) of only 27% suggests a serious need for optimization strategies. By improving the onboarding experience, developers can boost player engagement and RR.
• Cross-platform adaptability: Well-optimized games can run on various platforms, ensuring a wide gaming audience.

Now that you understand its importance, let’s break down how game optimization works.

How does game optimization work?

Game optimization requires many key functions to enhance a game’s performance and UX. These include:

• Profiling and benchmarking: Evaluate performance metrics such as CPU/GPU load, memory usage, and frame rate. This helps pinpoint which game elements aren’t working.
• Code optimization: Review and enhance the game’s code for efficiency.
• Asset management: Manage interactive, visual, and audio game elements to optimize performance.
• Memory management and load balancing: Managing memory and evenly distributing workloads across hardware. Both help to prevent crashes/slow loading times.
• Graphics pipeline and network optimization: Fine-tuning graphics and optimizing network code (in multiplayer games).
• User settings and scalability: Giving users in-game graphic settings to promote independent game performance ops.
• Test, iteration, and post-launch updates: Playtesting continuously to maximize performance and compatibility, both pre and post-launch.

Developers constantly need to optimize their games. But there’s no point without having clear performance goals. 

Setting performance goals

Before executing these functions, set some clear goals to measure your game’s performance. Common performance metrics to measure include:

• FPS (Frame per second): Measures how many frames are rendered in one second, indicating a game’s visual quality and smoothness. Lenovo claims that developers should aim for at least 60 FPS in their games.
• Network performance: Assesses the speed and stability of the game’s data transmission.
• Memory consumption: Measures how much RAM is used and how fast a game can load and switch between game stages without delays.

When setting goals for game optimization, consider factors like gameplay elements, genre, and style. For example:

• In first-person shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, gamers typically depend on quick-response controls. So having high FPS and low input lag are key.
• In an RPG game like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, visual fidelity and rendering efficiency are more important performance metrics that contribute to the game’s immersive experience.

Other key factors include the target audience and what platform they play the game on. For example:

• Games on laptops with integrated graphics (i.e. Intel HD Graphics) might struggle with long loading times and low FPS in games with strong graphics. 
• PC gamers with graphics cards (i.e. NVIDIA) can usually handle more complex graphics and higher resolutions.

Once you reach your performance goals, you’ve completed your current optimization process and you can set your next goals. To reach them, there are certain optimization techniques worth implementing.  

Common game optimization techniques

There are many techniques for streamlining game resources, minimizing processing, and smoothening gameplay performance. Here are some of the most common ones:

• LOD (Level of Detail): Adjusting detail levels according to the distance between the camera and objects. Developers reduce rendering overhead by adding simpler models in the distance.
• Culling techniques: Occlusion culling aims to prevent the rendering of objects that aren’t visible to the camera. 
• Geometry optimization: This involves simplifying complex 3D models by minimizing the number of polygons rendered with efficient mesh structures.
• Texture optimization: Compressing textures, using texture atlases, and reducing resolution to lower loading times. According to staff at Unity, texture compression typically reduces memory usage by 4x.
• Asset bundling: One way to optimize memory usage is by grouping assets into bundles. This also positively impacts loading items, ensuring resources are managed more efficiently.
• Caching and pooling: Used for regularly accessed data and certain objects, respectively.
• Optimizing code: This helps to avoid needless frame updates and using heavy calculations. Code optimization also helps detect potential bottlenecks in performance.

Hardware that aids performance goals

To optimize performance, certain hardware components play a key part in processing and rendering game elements:

• GPU (Graphics Processing Unit): Evaluates the graphic card’s performance when rendering visuals and images.
• CPU (Central Processing Unit): Determines how efficient a processor is at managing game logic.
• Input latency: Works out the delay between player input and the on-screen action.

Optimizing games for different platforms

Game developers typically need to optimize video games for various platforms. This table shows the metrics and methods required to ensure high-level performance (by platform).

Platform	Metrics	Functions	Techniques
Mobile	FPS, GPU/CPU usage, battery consumption, memory consumption, app size, network latency, data usage, thermal performance, frame time	Profiling/benchmarking, memory management, asset management, graphics opt., code opt., frame rate opt., UX opt.	Level of Detail (LOD), texture opt., shader simplification, culling techniques, texture compression, RAM opt., memory profiling, cross-device testing, multi-threading, algorithm opt., reducing game size, asset compression, audio compression, asset bundling/pooling, dynamic loading, resolution scaling, physics opt.
Console	FPS, GPU/CPU usage, memory consumption, input latency, loading times, temperature consumption, network latency	Profiling/benchmarking, memory management, load balancing, graphics pipeline opt., user settings/scalability, asset management, target hardware testing	LOD, culling, dynamic resolution scaling, asset bundling/pooling, shader opt., texture compr., multi-threading, object pooling, physics opt., geometry simplification, platform-specific opt.
PC	FPS, GPU/CPU usage, memory usage, input latency, loading times, temperature consumption, network latency, network bandwidth usage	Graphics pipeline opt., profiling/benchmarking, memory management, load balancing, scalability/user settings, target hardware testing	LOD, culling, dynamic resolution scaling, texture compr., shader opt., multi-threading, asset bundling/pooling, geometry simplification, physics opt., platform-specific opt.
VR/AR	FPS, GPU/CPU usage, latency, motion-to-photon latency, render time, memory usage, temperature consumption, battery life	Profiling/benchmarking, latency opt., rendering opt., foveated rendering, load balancing, UX testing	LOD, culling, texture compr., dynamic resolution scaling, shader opt., multi-threading, physics simplification, maintaining high frame rates, asset management
Game engines	FPS, GPU/CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, shader complexity, network latency, draw calls/batches, physics calculation load	Code opt., asset management, memory management, continuous profiling/testing, rendering pipeline opt., load balancing	LOD, multi-threading, platform-specific opt., code opt., user feedback/contributions, texture compr., asset bundling/pooling, culling, shader opt., geometry opt.

Essential game optimization tools

To effectively optimize your game, you’ll need the right tools to measure performance and pinpoint bottlenecks. Here are some of the most impactful and widely used profilers:

• Superluminal Profiler: Helps identify CPU and GPU issues with real-time data, improving frame rates and load times.
• Xcode Profiler: Ideal for iOS/macOS – tracks memory, energy usage, and CPU activity for targeted optimization.
• Qualcomm Snapdragon Profiler: Optimizes mobile games on Snapdragon processors by tracking memory, GPU, and CPU usage.
• Nvidia Insight: Optimizes shaders, graphics, and GPU performance Nvidia-based games.
• Arm Performance Studio: For ARM-based mobile devices, provides insights into memory patterns and CPU/GPU performance.
• Intel VTune Profiler: Deep insights on CPU-bound games, optimizing code, thread management, and memory for Intel systems.
• AMD Profiler: Analyzes GPU and CPU performance to optimize games for AMD hardware.

Game optimization – In conclusion

If you want to attract a wide audience that consistently enjoys your game, then you need to optimize thoroughly. While game optimization can be complex and tedious, it’s an essential part of game development.

Sure, implementing the best optimization practices will keep your game engaging and entertaining. But it will also perform aesthetically and technically at the highest level. No matter how much technology evolves, fine-tuning games in excruciating detail remains essential.