Panda3D Manual: Performance Tuning
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NOTE: THIS PAGE OF THE MANUAL IS STILL BEING WRITTEN. ## Modern Performance Tuning Introduction Inexperienced game programmers, when they see that their programs are running slow, often react by trying to reduce the number of polygons. This almost never makes any difference whatsoever. Back in the mid-90's, reducing polygon counts was a reasonable strategy to make games faster. That strategy just doesn't work any more. The reason for this is that video card manufacturers have been increasing the polygon limits of their video cards by leaps and bounds. In fact, they've raised the polygon limit so high that you almost never hit that limit any more: you usually hit some other limit first. That's the key to modern performance tuning: knowing all the limits of the machine other than the polygon limit, and figuring out which of those limitations you've run into. In other words, the key to modern performance tuning is diagnosis. ## Most Common Problem: Silly Little Bugs When people start performance tuning, they often start with the assumption that there's something serious wrong with the engine, or the design of the game. In my experience, however, 90% of the time the problem is that the game contains a silly (but destructive) bug. Here are some examples of bugs that I have seen: A game had a text readout in the corner of the screen, which got updated every frame. But they updated the text by creating a new text object, and forgot to remove the old text object. So the corner of the screen contained thousands of layers of accumulated messages. A shooter allowed you to fire bullets from your gun. But they forgot to remove the bullet after it collided with a wall. As a result, the bullets just kept going through the wall, and into outer space. Every bullet you or anyone else had ever fired was still flying through space, and the animation system was working like crazy to animate tens of thousands of bullets. Think of another example here. I cannot emphasize this too much: do not redesign your game, until you are sure that the problem isn't a typo! Imagine how irritated you would be if you wrote an MMO, and then spent six months reengineering it to make it faster, only to discover that the entire performance problem was an off-by-one error in a minor subroutine. Catching performance problems that are bugs can be tricky. The place to begin is using the same performance diagnostics that you would use for any other problem. However, you will usually find a red flag somewhere: if the performance monitoring tools say that you're rendering 50,000 models, but you only count 50 models on the screen, you're dealing with a bug. You need to be alert enough not to discount such red flags. If you see a stat that looks suspicious, don't assume that the performance monitoring tool is telling you the wrong thing --- assume that there's a bug in the code. ## How Fast Should it Run? One of the things that makes performance tuning difficult is that you need to find things that are running slower than they "should" - but how do you know how fast something "should" run? Experienced game programmers have a gut feel for what their video card should be capable of, but inexperienced ones often don't really know what to expect. This makes performance tuning that much harder. However, you have an advantage. We have a collection of sample programs demonstrating Panda3D features. It is easy to turn on the frame-rate meter to see how fast these samples run. The screenshots in the manual contain frame-rates, taken with a Radeon x700. That should give you a baseline. It is even more informative to turn on the frame-rate meter to see what your video card can deliver. Video Synchronisation Panda3D sometimes caps the framerate to not exceed the monitor's refresh rate: this is called video synchronisation. Panda3D knows that since the monitor can't refresh faster (the monitor refresh rate is usually between 60 and 85 Hz), everything above that rate is wasted, so Panda3D will not refresh faster than the monitor's refresh rate. To disable this and be able to see the 'true' framerate, set the config variable `sync-video` to `#f` in your Config.prc. ## List of Common Performance Issues Here is a list of things that can go wrong, roughly in order from most likely to least likely. Each of these has a section to explain it in greater detail. Performance Issue: Too Many Meshes. A well-made typical 3D model contains one mesh. Huge 3D models, such as the model of an entire dungeon or an entire island, might contain multiple meshes. 3D models created by inexperienced modelers can contain dozens of meshes. Most video cards can render about 300 meshes total for the entire scene. Panda3D contains tools to coalesce multiple meshes into one, but they aren't fully automatic. Performance Issue: Too Many State Changes. The state of an object is the sum of its color, material, light, fog, and other attributes. It can be expensive, for a variety of reasons, to have too many different states in your scene. It is better if many objects share the same state. Performance Issue: Too Many Text Updates. If you have lots of text in your game that gets updated every frame, it will often take a long time for Panda to keep regenerating the text. You need to minimize the amount of text to regenerate per frame. Performance Issue: Too Many Pixel Shader Instructions. If you are using per-pixel lighting, or hand-written shaders, you need to be conscious of how long your shaders are. Adding one pixel shader instruction can slow the video card a lot. Adding a texture lookup can slow it even more. Professional pixel shaders contain 20-30 assembly-level instructions. Performance Issue: Excessive Fill. The fill rate of the video card is number of pixels it can render per second. Objects that are occluded (behind other objects) still consume fill rate. The total fill-consumption of the scene is the total screen real estate of all objects, including the occluded ones. Particles, in particular, can consume fill-rate like crazy, especially if the camera gets close to the particles. Performance Issue: Memory Full. A floating point-number takes four bytes. Just one vertex contains (X,Y,Z), and a normal, and a texture coordinate. An RGBA color takes four bytes, so a 1024x1024 texture is four megabytes. Do the math, and you'll see how fast it all adds up. Performance Issue: Python Calculation. Python is a very slow language. Most Panda3D programs only run a few thousand lines of python per frame, since all the real work is done in C++. Sometimes, though, you need to do some complex calculation, and Panda3D just doesn't contain any C++ code to do it for you. In that case, trying to write the calculation in python can cause problems. You may need a C++ plug-in. Performance Issue: Failure to Garbage Collect. It's easy to get used to the fact that Python's garbage collector can automatically clean up Panda3D data structures. Unfortunately, there are a few structures that can't be cleaned up automatically. You need to know what they are, or you may end up with a leak. Performance Issue: Collision System Misuse. The collision system can detect most types of collisions very rapidly. However, it is possible to construct situations that the collision detection system just can't handle. Know what it's good at, and what it's not. Performance Issue: Motherboard Integrated Video. Motherboard video is very misleading. The chips have names like "Radeon" and "GeForce" that we have come to associate with speed, but these chips are an order of magnitude slower than real video cards. Programming for these chips requires special consideration. Performance Issue: Too Many Polygons. This is at the bottom of the likelihood list, but it can still happen. Usually this happens in combination with something else, e.g. if you have a large vertex shader, performance can be drastically reduced for each vertex you add. Performance Issue: Miscellaneous. There are a lot of small things that have a surprisingly large impact on performance. For instance, printing messages on the console can be very slow in Windows. This section lists a number of miscellaneous things that can bog you down. A recommended read about performance tuning is also chapter 28 of the book GPU Gems: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/books/HTML/gpugems/gpugems_ch28.html ## Incomplete Section Note: this section is incomplete. It will be updated soon.
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