We've been going along building our game and running it for sometime and it appears to be performing okay, but to really determine how our game is performing, we are going to have to profile. Profiling is the act of gathering information about how each part of our game is performing so that we can optimize the code or assets that are causing performance bottlenecks.

We could make some assumptions about how the game is running and start blindly optimizing code because it should be faster to do it a certain way, but in reality, the biggest performance wins won't be obvious until you see what the profiler is telling you about the game. To successfully profile an application one has to really look at the data objectively as poor performance could result from texture sizes, shaders, scripts, physics, draw calls, or even something as simple as adding fog.

So let's go through our current application and walk through the process of profiling it.