game-performance
Installation
SKILL.md
Game Performance
Systematic methodology for diagnosing and fixing game performance problems. Profile first, fix the root cause, leave headroom.
Core Principles
- Profile before optimizing. Measure, don't guess. The bottleneck is almost never where you think it is. Every optimization session starts with a profiler, not a hunch.
- Fix the root cause, not the symptom. Upscaling masks fill-rate problems but doesn't fix them — you still pay the thermal and battery cost. Fixing the source gives you FPS gains and thermal/battery gains.
- Isolate variables. Change one thing at a time, observe the metric, conclude. Changing three things simultaneously makes it impossible to know which one helped.
- Leave headroom. Never target 100% utilization. Background OS tasks, worst-case game moments (explosions, many entities), and thermal variance all eat into margin. Target 60–75% utilization at your FPS goal on min-spec hardware.
- Utilization ≠ performance. ~29% GPU at 1600MHz delivers the same FPS as 55% GPU at 830MHz — with roughly half the power draw. When the hardware has spare capacity, it downclocks to save power. Lower utilization at a lower clock is better than high utilization at a high clock.