PhysX 3.4 continuous optimization
Conventional 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 
April 2nd, 2016 at 10:17 am
Can you please elaborate about all these insignificant optimizations?
April 2nd, 2016 at 10:17 am
Can you please elaborate a bit about all these insignificant optimizations?
April 2nd, 2016 at 3:40 pm
Great work, keep it up!
Nice to see PhysX getting faster. I also follow the “every optimization matters” rule and believe it adds up over time giving better overall results, although sometimes people think I’m exaggerating.
Hope PhysX 3.4 will be available for public soon.
April 3rd, 2016 at 2:00 am
And yeah, like Dirk Gregorius said, it would be great if you could describe some of the more interesting of those “insignificant” optimizations, especially those that were not obvious or surprising.