Most of the game’s power consumption comes from its graphics: the first we should do is to tailor our Art Direction to our target experience, as it’s what will drive many technical and scope decisions.
We should ask ourselves “do we really need our game to aim for photorealism, or is there some value striving for something different?”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been universally acclaimed as a beautiful game, perfectly exploiting the limited resource of the Nintendo Switch.
However, it uses very few high resolution textures for a game so
rich!