Questions tagged [performance]
The quality, efficiency, and speed of running gameplay as a result of several factors in the design and structure of the game and its architecture.
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Why is it so bad to optimize too early?
After looking into optimization a bit, I have discovered (literally everywhere) that it seems to be a universally recognized sin to optimize a game too early.
I really don't understand this, would it ...
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How can I clean up excessive player-created rubble?
In my latest game I'm making, you can slice a 2D object arbitrarily, demonstrated in this gif:
You can continuously cut it into hundreds or thousands of pieces. This doesn't create a lot of lag, ...
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How many threads should I have, and for what?
Should I have separate threads for rendering and logic, or even more?
I'm aware of the immense performance drop caused by data synchronization (let alone any mutex locks).
I've been thinking of ...
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How do bullets work in video games?
I came across this question when I was designing a video game in C#.
If we consider games such as Battlefield or Call of Duty, hundreds or even thousands of bullets are flying at the same time. ...
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Should I use textures not sized to a power of 2?
In the early days of OpenGL and DirectX, texture sizes were required to be powers of two. This meant interpolation of float values could be done very quickly, using shifting and such.
Since OpenGL 2....
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When is the best time to consider performance?
I am coming from software development background. During the software
development cycle, we usually focus on functionalities and the working
product. At the end of development, we start optimizing ...
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What are the performance difference between unsigned and signed integers? [closed]
I am aware of the performance hit when mixing signed ints with floats.
Is it any worse to mix unsigned ints with floats?
Is there any hit when mixing signed/unsigned without floats?
Do the ...
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How can I improve rendering speeds of a Voxel/Minecraft type game?
I'm writing my own clone of Minecraft (also written in Java). It works great right now. With a viewing distance of 40 meters I can easily hit 60 FPS on my MacBook Pro 8,1. (Intel i5 + Intel HD ...
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How can I make A* finish faster when the destination is impassable?
I am making a simple tile-based 2D game, which uses the A* ("A star") pathfinding algorithm. I've got all working right, but I have a performance problem with the search. Simply put, when I click an ...
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How to handle a large number of pickups in a MMO game
How do games like Minecraft, or really any MMO game that has pickups, handle them?
Say terrain spawns 3 pickup drops of "dirt" everytime you dig said terrain.
Say every item has a rotation ...
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How can I reduce the performance impact of rendering trees?
I'm making a low poly stylized kind of game. I have a terrain with some water, and I want lots and lots of trees; I have 10,000 trees mass placed, at the moment. Each tree consists of no more than 200 ...
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Is the Microsoft recommendation to use C# properties applicable to game development?
I get that sometimes you need properties, like:
public int[] Transitions { get; set; }
or:
...
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6
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How to optimize the distance function?
While developing a reasonably simple RTS-like game, I noticed my distance calculations were causing an impact in performance.
At all times, there are distance checks to know if a unit is in range to ...
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Is it normal for a game to use 100% CPU?
I just implemented multi-threaded input handling in my game engine where the code that polls the OS to gather input from it and time stamps them is in a separate thread and each frame in the main ...
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Intentionally using "worse machines" to develop a game?
I am developing a game intended for desktop computers.
I am afraid of developing a game that will be too costly in aspects of performance, so I am wary of using a machine that might be better than the ...
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Optimization of rendering of cube world
I have a world made of many cubes (like in Minecraft), they have only color (not texture). I am rendering them using OpenGL 3.3 core profile (GLFW3, GLAD, GLM). I am already have done some ...
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How do OpenGL's texelFetch and texture differ?
I understand the main differences between texelFetch and texture, but have some questions about the details:
Does ...
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Improving an O(N^2) function (all entities iterating over all other entities)
A little bit of background, I'm coding an evolution game with a friend in C++, using ENTT for the entity system. Creatures walk around in a 2D map, eat greens or other creatures, reproduce and their ...
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Why does OpenGL >= 3 only allow VBOs?
I see that OpenGL versions 3 and up eliminate the use of client-side rendering. Immediate mode has been eliminated, and vertex arrays seem to be deprecated. Instead, if I understand correctly, VBOs ...
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Which opcodes are faster at the CPU level? [closed]
In every programming language there are sets of opcodes that are recommended over others. I've tried to list them here, in order of speed.
Bitwise
Integer Addition / Subtraction
Integer ...
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Is there any harm in having the main game loop run uncontrolled?
I was wondering if there is any possible harm when my game loop runs as fast as the system allows?
I currently have a loop, that, by measuring passed time in nanoseconds, runs the game logic and ...
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What is the benefit of triple buffering?
I read everything written in a previous question. From what I understand in double buffering the program must wait until the finished drawing is copied or swapped before starting the next drawing. In ...
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Objective-C or C++ for iOS games?
I'm pretty confident programming in Objective-C and C++, but I find Objective-C to be somewhat easier to use and more flexible and dynamic in nature.
What would be the pros and cons when using C++ ...
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How can I efficiently load huge volumes of star systems?
I am working on a space exploration and combat game, and I can create galaxies, nebulas, solar systems, and load and unload them procedurally as needed. Meaning the stars that the player can see are ...
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Cache misses and usability in Entity Systems
Lately I have been researching and implementing an Entity System for my framework. I think I read most articles, reddits and questions about it that I could find, and so far I think I am grasping the ...
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5
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Preferred way to render text in OpenGL [closed]
I'm about to pick up computer graphics once again for an university project. For a previous project I used a library called FTGL that didn't leave me quite satisfied as it felt kind of heavy (I tried ...
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Small, High-Speed Object Collisions: Avoiding Tunneling
EDIT/UPDATE: My biggest question right now is whether step 3's "t=..." equation is a good idea or there a better way to do it. Most other issues have been partially or fully addressed, but no ...
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Is there any documentation comparing/contrasting C++ standard library implementations? [closed]
(This is not game programming per se, but I'm certain if I asked this on SO I'd get told not to prematurely optimize, even though history tells us every large game ends up worrying about these things.)...
user744
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Why is chunk size often a power of two?
There are many Minecraft clones out there and I am working on my own implementation. A principle of terrain rendering is tiling the whole world in fixed size chunks to reduce the effort of localized ...
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How should I account for the GC when building games with Unity?
*As far as I know, Unity3D for iOS is based on the Mono runtime and Mono has only generational mark & sweep GC.
This GC system can't avoid GC time which stops game system. Instance pooling can ...
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Logging library for (c++) games [closed]
I know a lot of logging libraries but didn't test a lot of them. (GoogleLog, Pantheios, the coming boost::log library...)
In games, especially in remote multiplayer and multithreaded games, logging ...
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What is the optimal texture size?
I recently added a texture packager to my project that will pack a certain amount of textures into a single one, like this:
So for example this one is 582x1023 pixels in size. The goal of adding ...
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Is precomputed pathfinding still relevant?
Context
Old Lucas Arts (ScummVM era) point and click graphic adventure games used precomputed pathfinding. Here's a rough outline of the technique.
Step 1
The floor in each room was divided into ...
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Python Performance vs Game Maker [closed]
I was originally thinking of creating a game with Python and SFML. I understand Python is slow compared to C++, but how is it compared to Game Maker?
The main reason I ask is I recently played a Game ...
user6482
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"Optimal" game loop for 2D side-scroller
Is it possible to describe an "optimal" (in terms of performance) layout for a 2D side-scroller's game loop? In this context the "game loop" takes user input, updates the states of game objects and ...
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Is * calling *= (or *= calling *) slower than writing seperate functions (for math library)? [closed]
I have some vector classes where the arithmetic functions looks like this:
...
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How to continuously find all entities within a radius efficiently?
I have a very large number of entities (units). On each step, each unit needs to know the positions of all units near it (distance is less then given constant R). All units move continuously. This is ...
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Speeding up procedural texture generation
Recently I've begun working on a game that takes place in a procedurally generated solar system. After a bit of a learning curve (having neither worked with Scala, OpenGL 2 ES or Libgdx before), I ...
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Is there any performance benefit to sharing shaders between programs?
OpenGL allows you to share the same shader between multiple programs. Aside from saving small amounts of memory and a shader handle, are there any GPU-side performance benefits to doing this?
user744
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Why does Unity use reflection to get the update method?
Why does Unity use reflection in order to access MonoBehaviour message methods like Awake, ...
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How do C# and UnityScript differ in Unity development? [closed]
Other than the obvious language differences, how do UnityScript and C# differ when developing games in Unity3D?
Is there a noticable performance difference?
Is the UnityScript code packaged as-is? If ...
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Which Database (RDBMS vs NoSQL vs BOTH) to use for a Realtime Multiplayer Game?
I'm working on a realtime multiplayer game that will require a database (for features such as player profiles, friends, unlocks, news, etc.) This is a standard PC game (not browser-based) and will use ...
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Most efficient way to convert Vector3 to Vector2
What is the most efficient and fastest way to convert a Vector3 to a Vector2?
Casting:
Vector2 vector2 = (Vector2)vector3;
Initializing a new Vector2:
...
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Information about rendering, batches, the graphical card, performance etc. + XNA?
I know the title is a bit vague but it's hard to describe what I'm really looking for, but here goes.
When it comes to CPU rendering, performance is mostly easy to estimate and straightforward, but ...
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3D models budget. What matters more number of triangles or vertices
When I am making a model for a 3D game what should I take as a measure in my budget Polygons (triangles) or vertices? I have made an experiment with two sets 40000 cubes one with 8 vertices and 12 ...
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Is SVG a viable technology choice for web-based game? [closed]
I have started to read up about the web technology available for doing web-based game with only Javascript, but I have no where got feedback about SVG with HTML5. Is is a viable choice ? Does it ...
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How can I optimize a collision engine where order is significant and collision is conditional based on object group?
If this is your first time on this question, I suggest reading the pre-update part below first, then this part. Here's a synthesis of the problem, though:
Basically, I have a collision detection ...
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Is nVidia's CUDA suited to performing pathfinding calculations?
I want to know if it would be worth executing pathfinding on the GPU (using nVidia's CUDA, or an equivalent) in certain situations, or whether it would be a wasted effort. The situation I imagine ...
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How to handle multiplayer in JavaScript?
I'm just doing a bit of research into tech to use for a mobile multi-player game.
It's more an experiment at present so for the moment, the only thing that Players need to be aware of is the other ...
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Grouping entities of the same component set into linear memory
We start from the basic systems-components-entities approach.
Let's create assemblages (term derived from this article) merely out of information about types of components. It is done dynamically at ...
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