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> Maybe you could do less work producing just the few bytes

It takes more work to produce fewer bytes, because you've to pack the same information in fewer bytes. Entropy and all that.

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Not if the information starts out in fewer bytes. Then, you're just rearranging the bits into renderable order. "Chicken" is a very small number of bits that would need to be expanded to more bits (leg down here, wing over there, beak up here) before handing them over to the decoder to make actual feathers. The representation in a game's scene list is overwhelmingly more compact than the input to a decoder would be, and most of it barely changes from one second to the next, as the pixels are all replaced dozens of times over.

The information does not start out in fewer bytes. It starts out in all the bytes that represent the 3D models of entities you're interacting with in your game and the textures to cover them, at least. That's usually more bytes than needed to show a 32 bit 4K picture. The rendering process reduces all the jungle you have in your VRAM to a few kB that are briefly shown on your screen.

It seems like you don't know the basics of 3D graphics nor the basics of video encoding. It is extra work and would save some bandwidth needed to pump the picture to the display, which is not an issue in 3D graphics (we have dedicated cables).

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