PhysX 3.4 continuous optimization
Friday, April 1st, 2016Conventional wisdom says that you should use a profiler, find the bottleneck, optimize the bottleneck, repeat until the profile is flat.
Conventional wisdom says that you should not waste time with minor optimizations that won’t make a dent in the framerate. The gains must be “significant” to justify the time and effort spent optimizing.
Oh fuck off now. Conventional wisdom is stupid.
In terms of optimization I usually say that “everything matters”. All the minor insignificant gains eventually add up to something very valuable in the end. I’ve seen it on the ST. I’ve seen it on PC. I’ve seen it (a lot) on consoles.
And I just saw it again today. Here’s what 3 months of insignificant optimizations look like when you ignore conventional wisdom and keep doing them anyway. First changelist was at the end of last year, last changelist was last week. Scene is “ConvexGalore2″ in PEEL (bunch of convexes falling in a pile).
Granted: there is in fact a “significant” optimization in there that accounts for 1/3 of the gains. But the remaining 2/3 are from supposedly insignificant ones.
And that’s not even an April Fools joke 