This is true for all responsible people, the way I tackle this is to try and predict the future.
Recently I had to implement interpolation in my game engine, before looking at that I tried laying out animations in memory and noticed a 3x speedup. So when it was time to decide I took the seemingly coward route of exporting animations in 120 FPS instead, hitting disk ×5 and RAM ×2 but saving CPU ×3.
Time will tell if this was the right choice, ie. will games render at >120FPS. The debt was moved from technical to energy saving, from complex to simple, from now to the future (since exporting in 120 FPS takes a little more time every animation that goes into the game)
I'm going to keep investing in low power because that is more guaranteed than everything else.
Recently I had to implement interpolation in my game engine, before looking at that I tried laying out animations in memory and noticed a 3x speedup. So when it was time to decide I took the seemingly coward route of exporting animations in 120 FPS instead, hitting disk ×5 and RAM ×2 but saving CPU ×3.
Time will tell if this was the right choice, ie. will games render at >120FPS. The debt was moved from technical to energy saving, from complex to simple, from now to the future (since exporting in 120 FPS takes a little more time every animation that goes into the game)
I'm going to keep investing in low power because that is more guaranteed than everything else.