C++ Game Development Primer

Chapter    1

Managing Memory for Game Developers

Memory management is a very important topic in game development. All games go through a period in development where memory is running low and the art team would like some more for extra textures or meshes. The way memory is laid out is also vitally important to the performance of your game. Understanding when to use stack memory, when to use heap memory, and the performance implications of each are important factors in to being able to optimize your programs for cache coherency and data locality. Before you can understand how to approach those problems you will need to understand the different places where C++ programs can store their data.

There are three places in C++ where you can store your ...