Interactive visual
core
Frame Budget
every system shares one slice of time per frame
At 60 Hz a frame has 16.67 ms for input, gameplay, physics, AI and rendering combined. Measure each system and keep the total under budget with headroom.
Performance
Where the 16.67 ms of a frame go, and the standard ways to spend less of them.
7 cheat sheets · 3 subcategories
CPU
Budgeting and spreading work across frames.
Interactive visual
common
Time Slicing
let a different group think each frame
Split expensive per-entity work into buckets and run one bucket per frame. Cost per frame drops by the bucket count; each entity reacts a little later.
GPU
Fewer draw calls, fewer overdrawn pixels.
Interactive visual
core
Draw Calls
draw a thousand things in one request
Each mesh costs the CPU a draw call plus state changes. Instancing and batching turn thousands of identical objects into one call; track renderer.info.
Interactive visual
common
Overdraw
every layer on a pixel is paid for again
Overdraw is shading the same pixel more than once. Stacked transparent particles and big quads multiply fill cost; trim sprites and limit layers.
Interactive visual
common
Texture Atlas
many images, one texture, one material
Pack many sprites into one texture and address each by its UV rectangle, so objects share a material and batch into few draw calls. Pad to stop bleeding.
World
Organising large worlds in space and memory.
Interactive visual
advanced
Chunk Streaming
keep only the world around the player in memory
Split a big world into chunks, load those within a radius of the player and unload them past a larger radius, so the boundary never thrashes.
Interactive visual
core
Spatial Partitioning
only compare things that are near each other
Bin objects into a uniform grid so collision and proximity queries test only same-cell and neighbour-cell pairs instead of all n(n−1)/2 pairs.