A high performance visual profiler for games

Abstract

Video games are software products with the purpose to entertain its players. Unfortunately, the performance of video games can suddenly decrease; this phenomenon is called a frame drop, and causes the amount of fun experienced by players to drop. To avoid this behavior, usually the process of creating a video game involves trying to improving the performance of a game, usually aided by use of a performance profiler. We present a performance profiler designed to find causes of frame drops and other bottlenecks in video games. Current performance profilers are not suitable for video games because they are often slow while collecting data, so the interactive element of video games is lost and recreating events that cause frame drops is next to impossible. Furthermore, they accumulate information over relatively large periods of time making temporary drops in performance invisible and their causes difficult to find.This article describes a tool called GamePro. GamePro is a performance profiler that consists of two components: a data logger and a data presenter. The data logger is fast during run-time, has a powerful snapshot feature that collects timed data, and can inspect native and scripting methods. The data presenter is able to show causes of sudden drops in performance and other bottlenecks in software. Visualization is used to present the data and to enable the developers to find performance issues efficiently and effectively.

Improving Web Services Performance, One Step at a Time

“…A tracer (Roza et al, 2009) is a component that intercepts application code to record typed timestamped events. Examples of tracing tools include libraries like Perf4J 6 .…”