When optimizing your sound design, you should pay most attention to two parts: the processor and the memory. Every tiny bit of information that the sound engine touches needs to be processed, and everything that the system needs to learn or remember needs to be stored either on a hard drive or directly in memory.

As such, making games with a high degree of task handling, like having many concurrent active voices, implies processor optimization, whereas games with a large selection of sounds imply memory optimization.

As all game elements (such as audio, graphics, and physics) share the same processor and memory resources, it’s common to see specific resource budgets assigned to each department. If the audio caused the performance to lag, all other departments would be affected by this due to shared hardware.