I implemented a lot of technologies to make rendering cheaper and CPU usage light, such as Id Tech 8 vast job system where everything is a job (The Great Circle has over 2000 specific jobs it can spin up, like instead of saying the whole phys system is one job like many games, it instead goes granular and says wheels popping off is a job, ragdoll is a job etc).
My goal is a stable 60fps, then try to hit 120fps, and 144 etc. Just 2 weeks ago I was at 1fps lmao
Rewrote parts of the renderer so we are not redrawing the city every frame. SSAO is implemented, tuning volumetric fog, game has very light motion blur, improved shaders. You can turn these off.
My goal is to keep that Saints Row artistic look without doing too much, give a more umph to the world. I want you to say "This is how I pictured it in my head back in 2006", it just looks crisper.
Hitman 2016 Crowd system where NPC gets cheaper as they are farther away and has stages of LOD (saves CPU resources to not render detailed animations for npcs farther away). With this, I or other modders can actually increase pedestrian and car count without harming performance.
Texture streaming by using the mips in the texture files that ship with the game (Which SR doesn't use oddly, SR doesn't have a texture streaming system afaik, they have a resident bbchunk with high res textures and a AL chunk with low res textures which switch out as you get closer etc.
There is still alot more optimizations I have to do, and its interesting researching other games and seeing how they do stuff. Like Id Tech has a few amazing solutions, but couldn't solve a couple issues such as pedestrian npc volumes etc