Modern games aren’t “unoptimized”... you’re uust paying a hidden software tax

A lot of people say modern games are poorly optimized, but that’s not the full picture. What you’re really seeing is a massive software tax that didn’t exist back in the day. Older games had a huge advantage. Developers were writing code specifically for one system, sometimes even in assembly, squeezing every bit of performance directly out of the hardware. There were almost no layers in between. What the developer wrote is basically what the machine executed. That’s why games on older consoles could feel incredibly smooth despite limited specs. Now compare that to something like a modern Unreal or Unity title. The game isn’t talking straight to your GPU anymore. It goes through the engine, then a graphics API like DirectX or Vulkan, then the operating system before it ever reaches your hardware. Every one of those layers adds overhead. Not enough to break things on its own, but enough to stack up. That’s why you can run something like an older RPG or shooter flawlessly on weak hardware, then load up a modern indie built in a full engine and get random stutters. It’s not always about bad coding. It’s about the complexity of the pipeline the game has to go through just to render a frame. At the same time, modern games are doing way more. Higher fidelity assets, real-time lighting, physics systems, massive worlds, and cross-platform compatibility. None of that comes for free, and engines make it possible to build all of these features without starting from scratch every time. The tradeoff is that you lose that direct, hardware-level efficiency developers used to rely on. So when a new game struggles, it’s not always fair to call it lazy optimization. You’re looking at the cost of abstraction, scale, and flexibility all hitting at once.