On some of the larger maps in our game we are seeing a steady pattern of really slow frames. Upon further inspection, these frames always appear to be “empty” in the Microprofiler, which makes it impossible for us to debug what is happening. This occurs both in studio and in play time on the client.
We have no idea what’s causing these frames or where to even start debugging, but we have a microprofiler dump from the above screenshot that can be sent on request
Together these empty frames contribute to a significant decrease of player framerate.
I don’t do this stuff as much but it may be the case that the client and server’s processing power is being redirected somewhere else to a more heavy processing task. This could hypothetically result in the frames being non-existent/empty, and it may be connected with the GPU time going out of wack since it lacks power and tries to handle the other task.
This is just my little theory and I don’t even know if this is how this type of stuff works or anything.
The negative GPU time is normal when you select the current (rightmost) frame so we can ignore that here. It’s possible that the frames appear ‘empty’ because one or more threads have run out of log space, as indicated by the frame bars at the top being dark rather than orange. Finally the third image shows CPU and GPU time of 188/187ms. Since CPU time includes waiting for the GPU, this seems to indicate that the bottleneck here is the GPU.
In the second screenshot you can see that the highlighted frame is within the orange region, meaning it has not loaded out of buffer. The selected bar was orange before being hovered over.
The easiest way to look at the Microprofiler is to Dump the HTML and look at that in a browser. There are some features that only work that way. And yeah the main thread is towards the bottom.
