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Your game can be faster, because you restarted your PC

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Jan Mróz

Proposed by Jan Mróz

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Description

Your game can be faster, because you restarted your PC is Jan Mróz's profiling hygiene case study on how background applications and an unrestored OS session skew CPU and GPU measurements. He uses a Unity 6000 hobby project on an i5-10400F and RTX 5060 Ti with Nsight and Profile Analyzer across four workstation setups.

Heavy multitasking adds GPU interruptions visible in Nsight, widens frame-time ranges, and inflates CPU markers such as PostLateUpdate.FinishFrameRendering by roughly a third compared with a minimal single-monitor setup after reboot. Closing apps helps GPU stability; CPU medians only approached clean numbers after restart.

Beginner optimizers who profile on daily-driver PCs should read this before trusting small millisecond wins. The numbers are project-specific but the methodology generalizes.

The article is free on proceduralpixels.com with tables comparing median, quartile, and frame ranges across setups.

It is frequently paired with the proper profiling philosophy article when teams standardize lab conditions for optimization reviews.