Optimization
Premature optimization is the root of bugs that you need to handle for 18 years.
Premature optimization is the root of bugs that you need to handle for 18 years.
Optimization is the process of improving the performance of the program. The two common things that one try to improve is the speed, so it runs faster, or memory, so it use less of it. Often it is possible to trade one for the other, for example to calculate things in advance so the program do run faster but consume more memory. The process of optimization is made up of the following three steps.
Profile to find the hotspot
First one need to find a area to improve. The best one is the one that has the biggest potential to improve the overall performance. To do that one can use external or internal profiler. A internal profiler is something that one has built into the game and an external is another program that measure it's performance. In the end the profiler gives a measure of the current performance of that area. Common units to measure performance in is seconds (for speed) or bytes (for size). Depending on the scale unit prefixes such as milli or mega is common. When measuring speed one should use the unit seconds and not Frames per second.
Optimize it
Do whatever is needed to improve the speed, size or whatever of the hotspot.
Verify improvement
Run the tools (profiler, memory trackers) again to see if the performance has improved. If not try again :).
Build Time - Make the game compile faster.
Code Binaries Size - Make the binary file as small as possible.
Development Time - Improve the iteration time of the development of the game.
CPU Speed - Spend less time on the CPU.
GPU Speed - Spend less time on the GPU.
Memory - Use as little memory as possible.
Cache - Use memory in a way that your CPU like.
Content Size - Get the size of the game down.
Tools
Reference
Optimizations in C++ Compilers - 2019
Rules of optimization - 2018
The Elusive Frame Timing - 2018
Optimization and performance measurement - 2018
Profiling: The Case of the Missing Milliseconds - 2018
More performance, more gameplay - 2017
CppCon 2016: Nicolas Fleury “Rainbow Six Siege: Quest for Performance"
CppCon 2016: Jason Turner “Practical Performance Practices - 2016
CppCon 2016: Timur Doumler “Want fast C++? Know your hardware!" - 2016
Taming the Jaguar: x86 Optimization at Insomniac Games - 2016
C++ Performance: Common Wisdoms and Common “Wisdoms” - 2016
Stop Misquoting Donald Knuth! - 2015
Understanding Compiler Optimization - Chandler Carruth - Opening Keynote Meeting C++ - 2015
Code Clinic : How to write code the compiler can actually optimize - 2015
Optimizing software in C++ - 2014
Looking For a Good Sort - 2014
The microarchitecture of Intel, AMD and VIA CPUs - 2014
Optimizing subroutines in assembly language - 2014
Vessel: Common Performance Issues - 2013
Don't Help the Compiler - 2013
A Profiling Primer - 2013
Optimisation lessons learned - 2012 Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Visual C++ Performance Pitfalls - 2011
The Windows Heap Is Slow When Launched from the Debugger - 2011
Finding Bottlenecks by Random Breaking - 2011
Hotspots, FLOPS, and uOps: To-The-Metal CPU Optimization - 2011
Optimisation Lesson - 2011 : 1: Profiling , 2: The Pipeline and 3: The Memory Bottleneck.
Optimizations that aren't - 2010
Writing Efficient Game Code for Next-Gen Console Architectures - 2005
OPT#1:Profiling - 2020
Optimizing Trilinear Interpolation
AMD Ryzen™ Processor Software Optimization - Video / Slides
Optimizing for the Radeon™ RDNA Architecture- Video / Slides
From Source to ISA: A Trip Down the Shader Compiler Pipeline - Video / Slides
https://github.com/dvyukov/perf-load
Tracy Profiler
https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
Optick: C++ Profiler For Games
https://github.com/bombomby/optick
Optimizing Software Occlusion Culling - 2013
https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/optimizing-sw-occlusion-culling-index/
Performance Analysis and tuning on modern cpus - 2020
https://book.easyperf.net/perf_book
DoD book is good.
Otherwise, just go with simple stuff, and use a good profiler like Superluminal, to get the low hanging fruits.
You can go with the VS builtin profiler, cachegrind, et
The Art of Writing Efficient Programs
https://github.com/PacktPublishing/The-Art-of-Writing-Efficient-Programs
uops.info
https://www.uops.info/
superluminal
https://superluminal.eu/