performance - C++ Team Blog

The /fp:contract flag and changes to FP modes in VS2022

Gautham Beeraka (Intel Americas Inc) December 14, 2021 Dec 14, 2021 12/14/21

The /fp:contract flag and changes to FP modes in VS2022 In this blog we will cover a new feature we have added to the MSVC version 17.0 compiler in VS2022 that impacts the generation of Floating-Point contractions such as Fused Multiply Add (FMA) instructions. We will cover how FMA contractions are supported in pre-VS2022 MSVC compiler ...

2x-3x Performance Improvements for Debug Builds

Pranav Kant May 7, 2021 May 7, 2021 05/7/21

We have made substantial runtime performance improvements in the x86/x64 C++ compiler for Visual Studio's default debug configuration. For Visual Studio 2019 version 16.10 Preview 2, we measure 2x - 3x speedup for programs compiled in debug mode. These improvements come from reducing the overhead introduced by runtime checks (/...

Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios See 18.2X and 4.95X Link Time Improvements Respectively on Visual Studio 2019

David Li February 2, 2021 Feb 2, 2021 02/2/21

The C++ team at Visual Studio has delivered substantial compile and link time improvements throughout Visual Studio 2019. Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios shares their link time improvement wins.

The Coalition Sees 27.9X Iteration Build Improvement with Visual Studio 2019

David Li November 16, 2020 Nov 16, 2020 11/16/20

Visual Studio 2019 v16.8 Preview 3.2 introduces significant build and link time improvements. In this blog post, we detail how the team in The Coalition building Gears 5 tested the compile and link times in three different versions of Visual Studio.

JCC Erratum Mitigation in MSVC

Gautham Beeraka (Intel Americas Inc) February 4, 2020 Feb 4, 2020 02/4/20

The content of this blog was provided by Gautham Beeraka from Intel Corporation. Intel recently announced Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum which can occur in some of its processors. The MSVC team has been working with Intel to provide a software fix in the compiler to mitigate the performance impact of the microcode update that prevents ...

MSVC Backend Updates in Visual Studio 2019 Versions 16.3 and 16.4

Kevin Cadieux January 28, 2020 Jan 28, 2020 01/28/20

Versions 16.3 and 16.4 of Visual Studio 2019 brought many new improvements in code generation quality, build throughput, and security. If you still haven’t downloaded your copy, here is a brief overview of what you’ve been missing out on. Demonstration of C++ Build Insights, a new set of build analysis tools in Visual Studio 2019 ...

Game performance improvements in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.2

Natalia Glagoleva August 8, 2019 Aug 8, 2019 08/8/19

This spring Gratian Lup described in his blog post the improvements for C++ game development in Visual Studio 2019. From Visual Studio 2019 version 16.0 to Visual Studio 2019 version 16.2 we’ve made some more improvements. On the Infiltrator Demo we’ve got 2–3% performance wins for the most CPU-intensive parts of the game. Throughput A...

Improving the Performance of Standard Library Functions

Kirsten Lee July 30, 2019 Jul 30, 2019 07/30/19

In Visual Studio 2019 version 16.2 we improved the codegen of several standard library functions. Guided by your feedback on Developer Community (Inlining std::lldiv and Improved codegen for std::fmin, std::fmax, std::round, std::trunc) we focused on the variants of standard division (std::div, std::ldiv, std::lldiv) and std::isnan. ...

Improved Linker Fundamentals in Visual Studio 2019

Russell Hadley July 25, 2019 Jul 25, 2019 07/25/19

On the C++ team we’ve heard loud and clear from users that build times are a pain point. We’ve continued our focus on improving the step, linking, that dominates F5 build times. Fast F5 build times, or iteration build times, are a key contributor to developer productivity and we felt that there was a large opportunity so we narrowed in on ...

Inlining Decisions in Visual Studio

Terry Mahaffey July 24, 2019 Jul 24, 2019 07/24/19

Introduction My name is Terry Mahaffey and I work on the code generation team in MSVC. Lately I’ve been doing some work on our inliner and I wanted to give a brief introduction to it before later diving into some of the changes we’ll be shipping. Inlining is perhaps the most important optimization a compiler performs. In addition to ...

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