High-Performance Code on the Xbox 360
C# is a really nice language – it takes care of a lot of the little things for you, letting you focus on the bigger issues in your program. However, it can’t do everything – and even things it will do, it won’t necessarily do well, or when you need them. Garbage collection is the classic example. It’s nice that you don’t have to keep track of your things and clean up after yourself. The garbage collector isn’t there to take care of you though, and it’s not going to make sure your code runs nicely.
This is especially important on the Xbox 360, where creating objects is costly. The .NET Compact Framework team put together a set of pages back in December that are a must-read for anyone writing high-performance code for the Xbox 360 using XNA. They cover floating point performance, manual inlining, making the most of the multiple cores and lots on garbage collection. Unfortunately they don’t cover graphics performance, though they do mention that XNA has pretty much direct access to the graphics hardware. Go read them here and here.
Now I just need to reduce the amount of time my data-loader takes. Can anyone suggest any effective techniques for processing ~50mb of data on a per-byte basis? I’m already blocking data so it’s processed faster and I’m using value types so the heap doesn’t get nasty – any ideas?