I am writing a game engine, well I was using a float[] array to store my vertices, this worked well, but I have to send more and more uv coordinates (and other information) which needn't be stored as `float`'s so I moved from a float-Array to a Vertex Array:
https://github.com/Dav1dde/BraLa/blob/master/brala/dine/builder/tessellator.d#L30 


align(1) struct Vertex {
    float x;
    float y;
    float z;
    float nx;
    float ny;
    float nz;
    float u_terrain;
    float v_terrain;
    float u_biome;
    float v_biome;
}

Everything is still a float, so it's easier. Nothing wrong with that or? Well this change decreases my performance by 1000%. My frame rate drops from ~12ms per frame to ~120ms per frame. I tried to find the bottleneck with `perf` but no results (the time is not spent in the game/engine).

The commit:
https://github.com/Dav1dde/BraLa/commit/02a37a0e46f195f5a46404747d659d26490e6c32

I hope you can see anything wrong. I have no idea!

David:

> align(1) struct Vertex {
>     float x;
>     float y;
>     float z;
>     float nx;
>     float ny;
>     float nz;
>     float u_terrain;
>     float v_terrain;
>     float u_biome;
>     float v_biome;
> }
>
> Everything is still a float, so it's easier. Nothing wrong with that or? Well this change decreases my performance by 1000%.

Aligning floats to 1 byte doesn't seem a good idea. Try to remove the aling(1).

Bye,
bearophile

Am 24.07.2012 20:57, schrieb bearophile:
> David:
>> Everything is still a float, so it's easier. Nothing wrong with that
>> or? Well this change decreases my performance by 1000%.
>
> Aligning floats to 1 byte doesn't seem a good idea. Try to remove the
> aling(1).
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

This makes no difference.

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 08:57:08PM +0200, bearophile wrote:
> David:
> 
> >align(1) struct Vertex {
> >    float x;
> >    float y;
> >    float z;
> >    float nx;
> >    float ny;
> >    float nz;
> >    float u_terrain;
> >    float v_terrain;
> >    float u_biome;
> >    float v_biome;
> >}
> >
> >Everything is still a float, so it's easier. Nothing wrong with that or? Well this change decreases my performance by 1000%.
> 
> Aligning floats to 1 byte doesn't seem a good idea. Try to remove
> the aling(1).
[...]

I agree. I don't know how the CPU handles misaligned floats, but from what I understand, it will do two loads to fetch the two word-aligned parts of the float, and then assemble it together. This may be what's causing the slowdown.


T

-- 
Маленькие детки - маленькие бедки.

On 24/07/2012 20:08, David wrote:
> Am 24.07.2012 20:57, schrieb bearophile:
>> David:
>>> Everything is still a float, so it's easier. Nothing wrong with that
>>> or? Well this change decreases my performance by 1000%.
>>
>> Aligning floats to 1 byte doesn't seem a good idea. Try to remove the
>> aling(1).
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> This makes no difference.

Could be that your structs are getting default initialised so you will be getting a constructor called for every instance of a Vertex.

This will be a lot slower than a float array.
Try void initialising your Vertex arrays.

http://dlang.org/declaration.html

See the bit Void Initializations near the bottom.

Also make sure that you are passing fixed size arrays by reference.

-- 
My enormous talent is exceeded only by my outrageous laziness.
http://www.ssTk.co.uk

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 09:08:10PM +0200, David wrote:
> Am 24.07.2012 20:57, schrieb bearophile:
> >David:
> >>Everything is still a float, so it's easier. Nothing wrong with that or? Well this change decreases my performance by 1000%.
> >
> >Aligning floats to 1 byte doesn't seem a good idea. Try to remove the
> >aling(1).
> >
> >Bye,
> >bearophile
> 
> This makes no difference.

Hmm. Could this be a GC-related issue?


T

-- 
No! I'm not in denial!

> I agree. I don't know how the CPU handles misaligned floats, but from
> what I understand, it will do two loads to fetch the two word-aligned
> parts of the float, and then assemble it together. This may be what's
> causing the slowdown.
>
>
> T
>

Remvoing the `align(1)` changes nothing, not 1ms slower or faster, unfortunatly.

> Could be that your structs are getting default initialised so you will
> be getting a constructor called for every instance of a Vertex.
>
> This will be a lot slower than a float array.
> Try void initialising your Vertex arrays.
>
> http://dlang.org/declaration.html
>
> See the bit Void Initializations near the bottom.
>
> Also make sure that you are passing fixed size arrays by reference.
>

No. The vertices are just created once (with a call to the default ctor) and immedialty added to the Vertex* but they are never instantiated.

> Hmm. Could this be a GC-related issue?

Actually this could be. They are stored inside a Vertex* array which is allocated which is allocated with `malloc`, maybe the GC scans all of the created vertex structs? Could this be?

Am 24.07.2012 21:46, schrieb David:
>> Hmm. Could this be a GC-related issue?
>
> Actually this could be. They are stored inside a Vertex* array which is
> allocated which is allocated with `malloc`, maybe the GC scans all of
> the created vertex structs? Could this be?

    import core.memory;
    GC.disable();

directly when entering main didn't help, so I guess it's not the GC