There are many permutations of loops we can write, but what do they compile to? We should know the consequences of using an array versus a List<T>, for versus foreach, caching Length, and other factors. So today’s article dives into the C++ code that IL2CPP outputs when we write these various types of loops to examine the differences. We’ll even go further and look at the ARM assembly that the C++ compiles to and really find out how much overhead our choices are costing us.
Posts Tagged performance
This week we continue to look at the C++ that IL2CPP outputs for C# to get a better understanding of what our C# is really doing. Today we’ll look at how abstract methods work, whether casting of sealed classes is faster than non-sealed classes, and what happens when creating a delegate.
Today we continue looking at the C++ that IL2CPP generates for our C# code by calling various types of functions and using boxing and unboxing. Just how much performance overhead do these entail? Read on to find out!
The last time we looked at performance was way back in part four of the series. Ever since then we’ve been relentlessly adding more and more features to the C++ scripting system. So today we’ll take a break from feature additions to improve the system’s performance in a couple of key areas.
Last week in the series we took a step back to verify that the C++ plugin’s performance was acceptable. With that confirmed, we’ll continue this week by making our programming lives easier. One pain point so far has been with exposing new Unity APIs to C++. It’s not that it’s difficult to do this, but there’s a lot of boilerplate required. That boilerplate takes time to write and it’s easy to make mistakes copying and pasting existing functions. So this week’s article introduces a code generator that will write the boilerplate for us! We’ll also reorganize the project a little so the code that supports C++ scripting is separated away from our game code. That’ll make it easy to add support for C++ scripting to any Unity project.
In the first three parts of this series, we focused on setting up a development environment that makes it easy and safe to write our game code in C++. Today’s article takes a step back to assess where we are in terms of performance. Is what we’ve built so far viable, or are the calls between C# and C++ too expensive? To find out we’ll use the existing framework to write some simple performance tests.
The Unity API can mostly only be used from the main thread. This is used as an excuse by Unity developers to write all their code on the main thread. This makes their code run 2-6x slower. So what can we do about it? Today’s article presents a simple way to use the Unity API from other threads. Read on to learn how to unlock all that extra CPU power!
Threads allow us do more than one thing at a time using the CPU’s cores, but it turns out we can do more than one thing at a time using just a single core! Today’s article shows you how you can do this and the huge speed boost it can give you!
We’ve seen how using the CPU’s cache can lead to a 13x speedup, but that’s only utilizing one of the CPU’s cache types. Today’s article shows you how to go further by utilizing a whole other type of CPU caching!
Last week’s article showed how to effectively use the CPU’s caches to boost performance by an order of magnitude. Today’s article goes even further to show you how to use even more of the CPU’s capabilities!
