Game Development Ferrari
Imagine someone trying to make a Ferrari faster by bolting on a carbon-fiber spoiler - while towing a heavy trailer. Crazy, right? No matter how sleek the spoiler, the trailer keeps you slow.
This metaphor represents well what I witnessed many times in gaming industry. Performance can stall for the same reason: hidden “trailers” that drag down your frame rate.
Start With “Why?”
When performance dips, the first question should be “Why is this happening?” Skipping straight to “Let’s reduce the poly count” is like swapping the spoiler yet ignoring the hitch. Diagnose before you optimize.
I saw multiple cases, when addressing issue at it's core improved frame times by 20% - 50%, without loss on game visual quality. It can be multiple things - uncompressed textures, CPU bottleneck due having not enough frames in flight, multiple layers of transparency with heavy fragment shader on a UI element.
Find and Unhitch the Trailer
You can’t fix what you can’t see. Modern profilers and graphics debuggers reveal the real culprits. Here are some tools I like and use:
- RenderDoc
- NVIDIA Nsight
- Unreal Engine Profiler
- Other vendor-specific tools
What If You’re a Small Team?
If you need a profiler that’s easy to set up, affordable, and built for small- and medium-sized studios, check out what we’re building at FPSify.
Ready to find your trailer and unleash those extra FPS?
Stop polishing the spoiler. Unhitch the trailer.