MicroProfiler Modes

The MicroProfiler includes several modes, which can help you visualize your experience's performance characteristics in different ways. After opening the MicroProfiler with CtrlAltF6 (⌘⌥F6), use the Modes menu to switch between them.

Frame Mode

The most basic mode, frame mode shows a bar graph of frames flowing from the right (most recent) to the left. The height of each bar indicates the number of milliseconds that it took to complete the frame. Hover over a frame for some basic information around CPU and GPU usage.

• Orange bars indicate frames where the Jobs Wall Time exceeds the Render Wall Time. In these frames, at least one of the worker threads, which do things like run scripts, calculate physics, and play animations, took longer to run than the main render thread.

  If the experience is not reaching your frame time goals and has a large number of orange frames, common causes are scripts, physics, and animations. See Improving Performance.

• Blue bars indicate frames where the Render Wall Time exceeds the Jobs Wall Time. In these frames, the main render thread took more time than any of the worker threads.

  If the experience is not reaching your frame time goals and has a large number of blue frames, that indicates a rendering bottleneck. Common causes are excessive object density, object movement, and lighting. See Improving Performance.

• Red bars indicate frames where two conditions are true:

  • Render Wall Time exceeds Jobs Wall Time
  • GPU Wait Time is greater than 2.5 milliseconds

  Red bars are less common than orange and blue and often the result of excessive object complexity, texture size, and visual effects. Optimization is similar to blue bars. See Improving Performance.

Tiny tasks at the end of a frame can sometimes throw off the Jobs Wall Time and Render Wall Time, which is another reason to focus more on frame time than frame color. There's no "good" frame color to stive for. A mixture of orange, blue, and red isn't problematic as long as you're reaching the frame time goals for your experience. If you aren't reaching your frame time goals, the colors can indicate where to optimize.

Pausing the MicroProfiler with CtrlP (⌘P) while in frame mode launches detailed mode.

Detailed Mode

In addition to the bar graph from frame mode, detailed mode adds a colorful timeline that shows labels for each task.

• Labels that appear directly below another label indicate tasks that are performed as part of the higher-level task.

  Rather than the parent task, you typically want to troubleshoot the worst-performing child tasks; a parent task can't be shorter than the sum of its child tasks.

• Scrolling zooms the timeline in or out. Combined with the millisecond labels at the top of the timeline, you can get a sense of how long a task took in an absolute sense, but also how long it took relative to other tasks.

  

• The green overlay on the bar graph indicates the number of frames currently visible on the timeline—your zoom level. Left-click on a frame bar to jump to that position on the timeline.

  You might have to adjust your zoom level, but hovering over a bar highlights the frame on the timeline. Light grey lines delineate frames.

  

• Left-click and drag to pan the timeline. On a machine with many CPU cores, you might need to pan up or down quite a bit to find the main thread or the worker thread performing a particular task.

  

• Right-click a label to zoom the timeline to exactly the duration of that task.

• Left-click a label to add it to a line graph in the bottom-right. The graph shows the time the task takes each frame. Using this graph, you can test the performance of only certain tasks in your game. When you're done, right-click the graph to hide it.

  

  Use the Options menu to change the reference line on the graph to a different number of milliseconds.

• If the amount of information is overwhelming, hover over a label to find its group. Then use the Groups menu to filter the timeline to one or more groups, such as Physics or Render.

  

Timers Mode

Timers mode is an alternative way of visualizing the data in the detailed view: as a list of labels with processing times and call counts. Horizontal bar graphs in some columns help you spot the busiest tasks.

Controls are similar to the detailed view:

• Left-click and hold to pan up and down.
• Left-click a label to add it to the line graph in the lower-right.
• Use the Groups menu to filter the list.
• Use the Timers menu to customize the columns.

Counters Mode

Counters mode is a lengthy list of categories and statistics, including instance count and memory usage (in bytes) for the various tasks.

• Just like the detailed view, left-click and hold to pan up and down.
• Left-click in the Graph column to add a small usage graph with minimum and maximum values. Left-click the graph again to expand it.
• Right-click a graph to close it.
• You can't filter this view, but you can left-click on a category (for example, memory) to collapse it.

While counters mode can be useful, the Developer Console is the recommended way to identify memory issues. You might also find the X-ray view in the web UI helpful for identifying when problematic memory allocation occurs.

Hidden Mode

Hidden mode keeps the MicroProfiler menu open, but hides the bar graph. It's useful for reducing visual clutter, saving frame data, and pausing and unpausing while you observe the line graph.