Optimisation lessons learned (part 1)

Optimisation is a very special art form, with lots of tricks and realisations that give it a place of its own in the programmers toolbox. Until I had to do it for the first time on Swords & Soldiers for the Wii, I had never done any optimisation. At university I had already learned a lot about time complexity (big O notation, like O(n)), but optimising an actual game with a big codebase is a different beast entirely. I was like a virgin that had never been seduced by a handsome profiler yet.

I just started fooling around with optimisations, reading tutorials and articles on Nintendo's dev website and the internet in general, and learning as I went along. Since no pro ever taught me how to optimise, I guess I might still be unaware of some really important tricks. Yet somehow I managed to get Swords & Soldiers from an initial 10fps to 100fps on the Wii (if VSync is turned off), and Awesomenauts from 10fps to 70fps on the Playstation 3.

In past five years I spent some six months in total on several kinds of optimisation. Quite a lot of that was on bandwidth optimisations, but also a lot on framerate and loading-times optimisations, so I have quite a bit of experience with it by now. There is a lot of interesting stuff to say about it, so in the coming weeks I would like to share the most important lessons that I learned. Today's concepts are rather general, next week I will share some more detailed pieces of (hopefully) 'wisdom'. ^_^

Don't make any assumptions
This is by far the most important one. When I want to optimise something, I always have a some ideas in my head about which parts of the game must be causing the low framerates. In practice, however, it turns out that I am hardly ever right. When I fire up a profiler and analyse where time is really spent, the big optimisations almost always turn out to be somewhere else than expected. This is still the case, even though in the past five years I have spent so much time full-time on optimisation (especially Awesomenauts was a really complex beast to tame), optimising code for Wii, PS3, Xbox360 and PC. So much experience, yet my expectations are still usually wrong.

So the rule I derive from this, is to never take any action based on assumptions. Always let go of your assumptions. Take real measurements and work from there. And once something has been changed, measure again to see whether it really works. As Dutch physics teachers often say: "Meten is weten" ("Measuring is knowing").

Profilers are awesome
Which brings me to the best part: profilers (measuring tools) are awesome! They give insane amounts of detail on all kinds of things. The core for me is the hierarchical view. This starts in your main() function and tells you it is using 100% of the time (oh really...). From there you can keep opening function calls in a tree-like form, to see in ever more detail where the time is spent. Beyond this, profilers have all kinds of nifty tools. If you ever want to do any optimisation, be sure to start by getting a proper profiler!



I have to say, though, that I have not been able to find a really good, affordable profiler for PC. Wii, PS3 and Xbox360 all have excellent profilers that only work on that platform, but on PC, most profilers I have seen are either incredibly expensive (like the one in Visual Studio Team Edition), or lack the concept of a "frame" and thus don't allow me to find framerate hickups. The best one for PC I have seen so far is Very Sleepy, even though it completely destroys the framerate while running and doesn't know what a frame is either. But Very Sleepy is easy to use and the hierarchical tree-view is really clear. So if anyone has any recommendations for a better profiler for optimising games that are written in C++, then please let me know!

Premature optimisation is the root of all evil
I already mentioned that you should not make any assumptions, and this also leads to another important point. "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" is a quote from the famous computer scientist Donald Knuth, and it is all too true. Most optimisations make code more complex, more difficult to maintain and evolve, and more sensitive to bugs. Also, in practice, 99% of the code is completely irrelevant to performance. A couple of hotspots take up most of the CPU's time, and the rest just doesn't occur often enough to be relevant to optimise. So my conclusion is to not really care about performance and just write the cleanest, most readable code I can. Until the profiler says otherwise.



To give a simple example from C++: sometimes using a const char* is a lot faster than an std::string. However, the latter is so much safer to use, that I never use const char* until the profiler tells me I have a problem, and then I change it in that specific spot.

Modern consoles are ridiculously fast
When you look online for optimisation tips, or when you talk to hardened industry veterans, you will learn a lot of things that I dare claim are just not relevant any more. Consoles and PCs these days are so fast, that you can just waste performance on all kinds of things and still get a good framerate. Of course, I am not talking about the big games here: if you are working on the next Uncharted and need to squeeze every last bit of power out of the Playstation 3, then it probably becomes really important to look after every little performance detail, but in general: modern consoles are so fast that you can waste most of your processor time on inefficient code and still easily get a good framerate.

To give an example: a rule that some studios have is that dynamic allocations are forbidden. So calling new or malloc during gameplay is not allowed. Everything that is going to be used, must be allocated during loading, and then kept in pools for quick usage. This helps against memory fragmentation, but is also supposedly necessary to achieve a good framerate. I personally think this limits the code design way too much. It makes code more difficult to manage and extend during development, so I never do this. It turns out that even the Wii, supposedly the slowest of the current generation, can easily run 60fps with 100 characters walking around in Swords & Soldiers.

(Note that I did end up making my own memory manager to speed up allocations on the Wii, which I will discuss in a future blog post. But calling new tons of times each frame was not a problem in the end.)

My point here is not that everything is always possible, but I do think it is important to realise that unless you are making a triple-A console game, you should not worry about performance too much, definitely not early in development.



I personally find optimisation a lot of fun to do, so there is a lot more I would like to say about it. Next week I will be a bit more specific and follow this post up with some lessons that I learned about timing, threading, hiccups, and where the biggest performance improvements can be made.