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Improving Performance

OpenGL performs many complex operations—transformations, lighting, clipping, texturing, environmental effects, and so on—on large data sets. The amount of data and the number of operations can impact performance, making your stellar 3D graphics shine less brightly than you'd like. Unless, of course, you take steps to streamline your application.

Techniques for improving data throughput and increasing program efficiency are discussed throughout this book. This chapter provides additional performance guidelines and discusses some of the tools that you can use to analyze your application.

• “Best Practices” summarizes coding tips that can help achieve optimal performance and provides links to other sections, either in this chapter or elsewhere in the book, where you can read more details.

• “Gathering and Analyzing Baseline Performance Data” shows how to use top and OpenGL Profiler to obtain and interpret baseline performance data.

• “Identifying Bottlenecks with Shark” discusses the patterns of usage that the Shark performance tool can make apparent and that indicate places in your code that you may want to improve.

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