This brings us to the book's conclusion, and hopefully you enjoyed the ride. To reiterate perhaps the most important tip in this book, always make sure to verify the source of the performance bottleneck via profiling before making a single change. The last thing we want to waste time on is chasing ghosts in the code base, when five minutes of profiler testing can save us an entire day of work. Also, in a lot of cases, the solution requires a cost-benefitting analysis to determine if we're not sacrificing too much in any other area at the risk of adding further bottlenecks. Make sure to have a reasonable understanding of the root cause of the bottleneck, to avoid putting other performance metrics at risk.

Performance enhancement can be a lot of fun since, due to the complexity of modern computer hardware, small tweaks can yield big rewards. There are many techniques that can be implemented to improve application performance or speed up our workflows. Some of these are hard to fully realize without the experience and skills necessary to spend a reasonable amount of time implementing them. In most cases the fixes are relatively simple, once we find the source of the problem. So, go forth and use your repository of knowledge to make your games the best they can be!