The Clickteam Fusion 2.5 optimisation & performance Hard Data thread

[Simon]

Really excellent to hear that @Evilized79 - if you can grab some before and after stats as Volnaiskra suggested that'd be great to see them!

[Volnaiskra]

I've done a few tests on Spryke (in DX9 mode), and the results are pretty impressive.

In 2.5, all my events took an average of 184µs to complete per loop when idle, 283µs when moving around, and consumed 940MB RAM.
In 2.5+, those stats are 145µs, 285µs and 777MB
That amounts to 27% better performance when idle, 36% better performance when moving, and a 17% RAM reduction, just from using 2.5+. That's pretty darn good!

Interestingly, the chunk of code I have at the end of my events experienced by far the best performance increase. This includes VACCiNE and volCAMERA, and some other miscellanous debugging stuff I have in there. I only measured this chunk as a single block, unfortunately, so I don't know what got the biggest boost. But all together, this block sped up by a whopping 314% (from 95µs to 23µs per loop). I read somewhere that 2.5+ has optimised the way it handles keyboard/input polling, so that's perhaps where most of the boost is coming from (VACCiNE largely concerns itself with keyboard/gamepad inputs).

As I said, all of this relates to DX9. In the brief time I've spent with DX11 mode, I've seen unfavourable results - visibly more stuttering, and a forced framerate cap. But I'm reserving judgement of DX11 until it's had more time to get through its teething issues. And with the very significant performance boost that we just got in DX9 mode, who cares about DX11 anyway?

I also tested the impact of having the new "optimise events" box turned off. In my testing it appeared to speed up my events by one or two µ, which is basically nothing. But from the help file, it sounds like this box does the sort of stuff that I've already been careful to do myself, like put cheap conditions ahead of expensive ones, and combine events with the same conditions. It's still good to know that Fusion will do this stuff on its own now, even if we forget to.