The developers of Crusader Kings III talked about the optimization results ahead of the release of the By God Alone update. The team not only considered simulation speed, but also game loading, VRAM usage, and post-game RAM consumption.
The main goal is to restore daily performance to Scribe update 1.19.0 levels. The team is now close to that metric. At the same time, the startup speed of the game is particularly noticeable: on the test computer, the time from startup to the main menu was reduced from 84 seconds to 16 seconds due to streaming loading of models and illustrations instead of preloading. Video memory consumption is also reduced by approximately one-third in the same scene, depending on the quality of the texture.
Optimization also affects the simulation itself. On a reference 2012 eight-core PC, a single game day only took a fraction of a second, although the load increased as the campaign progressed: the period from the 1070s to the 1160s required about one and a half times the computational effort. Most resources are consumed by AI decisions, precomputation of changes, its applications and events. Developers also discovered less obvious sources of load and many times reduced the cost of individual checks simply by removing unnecessary calculations.
