The main problem with modern hardware is that it needs to have an abundance of resources because of sarcastic questions like this. There is no reason why memory-efficient programming should be considered outdated.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Yeah but pretty textures and detailed models are nice too. And maybe you want to use a scripting language for parts of the game to save a bunch kf dev time

That's not the same as an unoptimized game. I have games running at triple digit fps that require more memory and disk space than 10 year old me thought possible.

Also unused memory is useless. Caching things is good.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 1 points 25 minutes ago

Unused memory is not useless, it is just unused. If I want to pull up a guide on how to giggle the grables in my favorite game Grable Giggler, I would be very happy if I had unused memory which I can now use for my browser.

Also, smaller RAM usage generally correlates to smaller file size, which is very useful on computers with limited storage.

And finally, there's also low spec gaming and accessibility. Minecraft, at least prior to the microsoft acquisition, was a very low spec game. I wouldn't say it was optimized, but a game of minecraft took less ram than chrome. There was nearly no computers at the time which couldn't run minecraft. At the time of minecraft's early boom, kids were getting low-spec hand-me-downs, and so minecraft was one of the most open-ended games they could play. What I'm trying to say is that minecraft—and Doom for that matter—owe a large part of their success to low memory usage.