New PC Games 3D Multiplayer Online Game Programming Software: Where do we begin threading? Profiling, Profiling, Profiling. A good understanding of application behavior is needed before we can decide what type of parallelism is best suited for a particular subsystem.

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Quake* 3

Profiling

So, where do we begin threading? Profiling, Profiling, Profiling. A good understanding of application behavior is needed before we can decide what type of parallelism is best suited for a particular subsystem.

Sampling the application with the Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer will give us a detailed analysis of the amount of CPU time being used by each module and function. This information provides useful insight into doing a functional decomposition, meaning it will help us decide what portions of the engine we would want to run on multiple threads in parallel to maximize performance.

Generating a call graph of the application running a specific workload using the Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer will give us a detailed analysis showing the self time (time being spent in a function) and total time (time spent in a function and all the functions called within it) at each node, along with the call hierarchy. This information, along with the sampling data, can provide useful insight into where it's best along the call tree to do a data decomposition.