Comment by ehsankia

Putting aside the bad analogy that the other comment covers, the overall point I was making also covers doing the optimization before game release, but after the game is more or less complete. Rockstar optimizing during the final few months of playtest wouldn't be premature optimization.

Premature optimization is about trying to optimize the micro (a given function), while you don't yet have the macro (the game itself). If the function accounts for 0.1% of the performance of the final game, it doesn't matter if you make it 5x faster since that will only make the game 0.08% faster. You could've spent that time optimizing a different function that accounts for 10% of the performance, and even optimizing that function by 5% would make the game 0.5% faster, which is more impactful.