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I may be naïve/out of the loop here, but it’s fun to imagine what would be possible with the same gusto and creativity applied to today’s hardware. I imagine that a significant amount of modern hardware, even in games, is eaten up by several layers of abstraction that make it easier for developers to crank out games faster. What would a 90’s developer do with a 16-core CPU and an RTX3080?

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You can check out some demoscene demos [0], which usually do this (albeit to save executable size instead of just to run fast). These days you don't even have to run them yourself; most have YouTube recordings.

[0]: https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Windows&pa...

Well to be in the spirit with the parent it should also try and use terabytes of storage to push the storage to the limit.

You see a bit of this sort of optimization at the end of a game console's life cycle.

I expect the PS3 still has some headroom since few games adequately exploited the Cell processor's SPUs.

Since the Switch is underpowered compared to PS5/Xbox Series X/PC perhaps we'll see some aggressive optimization as developers try to fit current-gen games onto it.

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