The performance of a game is critical – it defines the scope of a game. It specifies how many, how far, how much detail, the level of freedom, even the length of the project. Whether you are an artist, designer, producer or programmer, the performance of a game has an impact on you. As Jeff Atwood recently stated, “Performance is a feature” and as with all features, they need to be scheduled, researched, implemented and maintained.

This article is the first in a series based on the Masterclasses which I’ve recently presented for Game Connection, and will walk you through several phases of optimisation performed on a simple piece of code. It is primarily aimed intermediate programmers  or experienced programmers who haven’t had much to do with performance and low level programming. The aim is to give a detailed example of finding performance bottlenecks and then addressing them. It should give you and idea of how code can be optimised and the magnitude of performance improvements you can expect from different changes. The series of lessons will cover profiling, branch removal, cache aware programming, loop unrolling and SIMD programming.