Transforming Performance Management for Confident and Rapid Release
On Thursday 13th October – 5PM GMT / 12PM EST / 9AM PST – GameBench is running the second of our free-to-attend Performance IQ webinars focused on the transformative potential of scale and automation in game performance management. In advance, we summarize below the implications of our latest developments.
The Studio SDK – our embedded performance monitoring solution – has revolutionised the effectiveness and efficiency of game performance management. Further recent developments in the SDK, along with a radical evolution in the associated Web Dashboard, have dramatically moved the needle for devops and QA.
Exponential scale in testing and analysis
GameBench’s current development path is dedicated to the systematic automation of all possible aspects of performance testing and analysis. The goal is to both simplify and accelerate the route to release, by significantly reducing the traditional manual back-and-forth between new versions and device performance issues.
Here’s our Studio SDK Product Manager, Andrew Fester:
“Before these latest changes, users could see the data and individually assess each testing session. We could compare two or three data points, which was useful, but didn’t realize the full potential of our tools. Now, within a single day, instead of running say five sessions, we can feasibly run 200-300 sessions.
But to inspect each one of these multiple sessions, and find a problem, would be a huge amount of manual work. So to achieve economies of scale, we’ve built out from what started as a raw data point system, to create an evolved analytics platform.”
Right from the homepage of the dashboard, users now have immediate visualization of the most critical performance issues. From there, they can navigate directly to rich comparative analysis of the relative performance of multiple devices, with anomalies identified and isolated against the developer’s own device tiering.
Rapid and flexible device tiering
Identifying and grouping mobile devices into performance tiers, based on realistic thresholds, is a long-standing challenge to game developers. It’s both technically and commercially critical, because it frames the performance trade-offs that balance the optimum gamer experience on higher-end devices, with maximum market penetration – i.e. playability – through mid- and lower spec devices.
Here’s GameBench founder and CTO Karthik Hariharakrishnan:
“Developers naturally want to introduce performance improvements with reduced failures. This means understanding poorly-performing devices according to easy-to-set thresholds, and isolating devices that are not performing well over builds. So these latest features across the SDK and the dashboard now provide a much easier method to track the performance of a group of devices that belong to different tiers.“
“We’re giving our users ‘go / no-go confidence’, enabling them to create their own device tiers and pinpoint problematic devices. In other words, what was previously more of an educated guess, becomes a far more rapid and well-informed decision.“
The preceding Performance IQ webinar on Game Performance Automation can be viewed here. And the related PIQ bulletin is here.
Register now to join the in-depth discussion on October 13th! We look forward to seeing you then and there.
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