What does game dev optimization look like? When I was in college, one of my professors told the class: Do not optimize code because the compiler is smarter than you. He was wrong. As an example, here is the timeline of a frame from Uncharted 2 (my old gdc talk). The SPUs are mostly fully occupied. For context, anything in blue was hand-optimized by the ICE team. Everything in RED was hand-optimized by the game team. And the rest was optimized to various degrees. Without hand-optimization, we wouldn't have fit in frame.