Extremely low FPS, what profiling application should I use to find performance issues?

Question

I'm creating an XNA game and am getting an unexpected result, extremely low FPS (About 2-12 fps). What program should I use to test performance and track down what is slowing it down?

Answer 1

Have you tried using SlimTune?

You could also use StopWatch to measure sections manually.

Answer 2

Okay, let me bring my personal experience with game development in XNA.

The first thing you need to do is go into Debug -> Start Performance Analysis. This profiles your CPU activity and see's what threads are in use and what is doing the most processing.

You also need to factor in a couple of more things:

-You are probably running in debug mode, this means that some of your CPU is being dedicated to VS and to check for exceptions and what not.

-Your code might be inefficient. I recommend trying to limit the amount of Lists, Arrays, ADT's, and objects created during run time, because that slows it down a lot. Last time I checked the Game Loop ran 60 times a second so that imagine what a strain it would be to allocate a new List, then garbage collect it, 60 times a second. It starts adding up.

-I don't know how advanced you are, but read up on parallel threading, or multitasking. An example would to have your physics engine 1 frames behind your graphics update.

EDIT: I realized you found your mistake but I hope this post can help others.