Originally Posted by
badass
Yes and no I'd say. Obviously a bad design cannot be optimised anything like as much as something well designed. However you can design software with future optimisations in kind without implementing them - only to optimise later. E.g. you want to throw out a working engine/world quickly. The code to render the entire scene is less than the code that includes removal of objects off camera and objects blocked by other objects (Occlusion culling). The engine is designed to have that part there from the ground up, however the actual process just skips for time reasons.
Later, you optimise by beginning work on your occlusion culling.
If they had followed modern (at the time of inception) software development practices they would have been doing this all along. However like you I suspect they haven't.
What seems strange to me is that my machine is CPU limited - i.e. all 6 cores/12 threads at 100% while the GFX card hovers between 50% and 90-100% depending on the situation. I wonder what CPU usage is like for more cores?