How can you improve game code performance and memory efficiency?

1 Use data-oriented design

Data-oriented design is a paradigm that focuses on how data is organized, accessed, and manipulated, rather than how objects are defined and interact. By aligning data structures with the hardware architecture and minimizing dependencies and indirections, you can optimize the cache usage and reduce the memory footprint of your game code. Data-oriented design also enables parallelism and concurrency, which can boost the performance of your game on multicore processors. To apply data-oriented design, you need to analyze the data flow and dependencies of your game systems, and use appropriate data structures and algorithms that suit the hardware and the problem domain.

2 Avoid premature optimization

Premature optimization is the practice of trying to optimize your game code before you have a clear understanding of the performance bottlenecks and trade-offs. Premature optimization can lead to wasted time, complex code, and unintended side effects, without significant improvement in performance or memory efficiency. Instead of optimizing your game code blindly, you should follow a data-driven approach that involves measuring, profiling, and testing your game code regularly and systematically. This way, you can identify the critical sections of your game code that need optimization, and apply the most effective and relevant techniques for your specific case.

3 Use memory pools and custom allocators

Memory pools and custom allocators are techniques that allow you to manage the memory allocation and deallocation of your game objects more efficiently and flexibly. Memory pools are pre-allocated blocks of memory that can store objects of a fixed size or type, while custom allocators are classes or functions that control how memory is allocated and deallocated for your game objects. By using memory pools and custom allocators, you can reduce the memory fragmentation and overhead caused by the standard memory management system, and improve the performance and memory efficiency of your game code. You can also tailor the memory pools and allocators to suit the specific needs and behaviors of your game objects, such as their lifetime, frequency, and alignment.

4 Use smart pointers and RAII

Smart pointers and RAII are techniques that help you manage the memory ownership and lifetime of your game objects more safely and automatically. Smart pointers are objects that wrap around raw pointers and provide additional features, such as reference counting, ownership transfer, and automatic deletion. RAII stands for resource acquisition is initialization, and it is a principle that ensures that resources, such as memory, files, or sockets, are acquired when an object is created and released when the object is destroyed. By using smart pointers and RAII, you can avoid memory leaks, dangling pointers, and double frees, and simplify the memory management of your game code.

5 Use compression and streaming

Compression and streaming are techniques that help you reduce the memory footprint and bandwidth of your game assets, such as textures, sounds, or models. Compression is the process of encoding your game assets in a smaller and more compact format, while streaming is the process of loading your game assets on demand and in chunks, rather than all at once. By using compression and streaming, you can improve the memory efficiency and performance of your game code, and also enhance the user experience by reducing the loading times and memory consumption of your game. You can use various compression and streaming methods and tools, depending on the type and quality of your game assets and the target platform and device of your game.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?