I keep most of my scenes lean by baking what I can – lightmaps for static geometry, normal maps to fake detail, and I use LOD switches to swap in lower‑poly versions when things move away. Culling is a lifesaver – frustum, occlusion, and distance culling cut out a lot of unseen geometry. For shaders, I write them to be as cheap as possible: avoid branching, use a few packed uniforms, and I’ll fall back to simpler versions if the GPU is choking. Finally, I stay close to the target hardware: I test on a mid‑range card, tweak draw calls, batch static meshes, and keep an eye on overdraw. That way I can push detail where it matters and keep the frame rate up.