benchmark – Nuclex Games Blog

Nuclex Signal/Slot Library: Benchmarks

October 13, 2019October 23, 2019 Cygon

When you’re writing some code that needs to notify code in othe r parts of the program, your weapon of choice is the "signal / slot concept". A signal is a connection point where any interested party can register a callback function to be invoked when the signal emits/fires.

There’s already an ocean of libraries out there providing this functionality to C++, but as you will see in this article, they’re all suffering from performance issues in one way or other. Plus, most don’t compile without warnings, have inconvenient sytax or lack unit tests.

So here’s the signal/slot "library" (it’s just three headers) I wrote to fix those issues for me, together with a summary of my design goals and a comprehensive benchmark on different compilers and CPUs.

Chart showing the PrimitiveBatch benchmark results in XNA 4.0, clipped to 500 FPS

DynamicVertexBuffer versus DrawUserPrimitives, Round 2

November 6, 2010February 21, 2012 Cygon

More than a year ago, I did some benchmarking in XNA 3.1, comparing the vertex throughput I could achieve on my GeForce 8800 via XNA’s DynamicVertexBuffer class versus just calling GraphicsDevice.DrawUserPrimitives(). Here’s my earlier benchmark: Efficiently Rendering Dynamic Vertices.

In all cases, DrawUserPrimitives() was marginally faster than the DynmicVertexBuffer, but it appeared to be a very bad idea to use a DynamicVertexBuffer on the Xbox 360. I had a really nice discussion with Shawn Hargreaves on the XNA forums where he provided a lot of in-depth information about how things work on the Xbox 360: .

One of today’s threads on the AppHub forums reminded me if my earlier benchmarks, so I decided to dig out my old benchmark and redo it in XNA 4.0. The benchmark uses my Nuclex Framework‘s PrimitiveBatch class, which underwent some changes since then, so I repeated the XNA 3.1 benchmarks in addition to getting the new data for XNA 4.0.

XNA vs Silverlight vs Native Code

October 10, 2007February 27, 2012 Cygon

If you write a game in Flash, you will have to accept some performance limitations and make some compromises in terms of available technology (eg. no Ageia PhysX or hardware shaders for you). But nearly everybody can play the game right in his browser, dramatically expanding the number of people that see your game.

Now Microsoft is hurling a competitor to Flash at the market: Microsoft Silverlight. It is based on the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and WPF, which makes it about 1000 times more powerful than Flash. WPF also includes 3D graphics and is way faster than flash, allowing for full-screen animations where flash would slow down to a crawl. It’s being ported to Mono/Linux as well, with the help if none other than Microsoft!