Do you think it's a good idea to use more metrics than just average frame rate when testing render performance? I mean 95th percentile, minimium frame rate, etc.
How do you benchmark your game?
Yeah average framerate alone definitely isn't enough. You really want a graph of frame times (don't use FPS, it's non-linear) so that you can clearly see if there's any spikes, fluctuations, or stuttering. A highly variable frame time results in a very bad playing experience, even if the average frame rate is still "high". So a game that's locked at a constant 33.3ms (30fps) will often be perceived as "smoother' than a game that averages close to 16.6ms (60fps) but fluctuates from frame to frame.
Profiling helps identify bottlenecks, when looking to optimize. Profilers tell you the average amount of time a function takes, and even more importantly, the number of times it is called during a specific program run. Saving 10ms on a function that is only called 20 times a frame isn't as good as saving 1 ms on a function that is called two hundred thousand times a frame.
Fps is a bad test - as in, if you are testing the whole range of possible inputs (which you kinda should check, at the very least checking the limits)- you could speed up the avarage fps - and perhaps make every number modulously divided by 5 much slower then the avarage resulting in jumpy gameplay even though the function on avarage is faster.
Mapping out your program/parts of your program by hand before you dive into writing them often saves a lot of time when it comes to optimizing, as you should be able to see where your bottlenecks are likely to accure if you would of attempted to write it the way you origionally intended and can code with the intent on not having certain bottlenecks.
Mapping out your program/parts of your program by hand before you dive into writing them often saves a lot of time when it comes to optimizing, as you should be able to see where your bottlenecks are likely to accure if you would of attempted to write it the way you origionally intended and can code with the intent on not having certain bottlenecks.
Speaking of profiling and performance tracking, riting your own lightweight profiler is a great way to keep on top of how different bits of your game are performing. You set it to run per-frame and record timings for various bits of code. This is valuable for knowing where to look when you get performance drops during development - you might think the hit may be coming from what you're working on, but another part of the code has been affected.
A good example/tutorial is here:
http://www.rorydriscoll.com/2009/04/21/direct3d-11-multithreading/
I wrap certain functions up (culling, physics update, particles update, game code update, rendering, etc etc) in a profiling event and output a colour coded graph so I can quickly see what's going on. No where near as fine grained as a proper profiler but I feel it's much more useful!
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