“Understanding how the pipeline slots are being utilized can greatly increase the performance of the application. If pipeline slots are blocked for some reason, performance will suffer. Likewise, getting an understanding of the various cache misses can lead to a better organization of the data. This can increase performance while reducing latencies of memory to CPU.”
Multicore Performance Challenges for Game Developers
Game developers face a unique challenge – how to make their graphics-heavy applications perform well across a very wide spectrum of hardware devices, not just high-end systems. So while an early version of a game might have been developed on some high-end system with 10 teraflops of CPU potential in a discrete graphics card, how do you scale it down to smaller consumer devices where optimization options are more limited?
Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzer for Faster Graphics Performance
“Just as developers need tools to understand the performance of a CPU intensive application in order to modify the code for higher performance, so do those that develop interactive 3D computer graphics applications. An excellent tool for t this purpose is the Intel Graphics Performance Analyzer set. This tool, which is free to download, can help the developer understand at a very low level how the application is performing, from a number of aspects.”