Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

The importance of data layout

The importance of how our data is organized in memory can be surprisingly easy to forget about but can result in a fairly big performance boost if it is handled properly. Cache misses should be avoided whenever possible, which means that in most cases, arrays of data that are contiguous in memory should be iterated over sequentially as opposed to any other iteration style.

This means that data layout is also important for garbage collection since it is done in an iterative fashion, and if we can find ways to have the GC skip over problematic areas, then we can potentially save a lot of iteration time.

In essence, we want to keep large groups of reference types separated from large groups of value types. If there ...