Frame Budget Forensics: Profiling the Pipeline Before You Optimize
You've got 16.6 milliseconds to render a frame at 60Hz. That's it. And somewhere in that sliver of time, your pipeline is hiding a problem—a rogue draw call, a texture bind you forgot, a culling pass that runs too late. But if you start guessing, you'll burn weeks on the wrong fix. I've seen teams optimize a shadow pass for two days only to find out the real cost was in the post-processing stack. So before you change anything, you need to profile. Not casually—deliberately. That's what frame budget forensics is about: reading the pipeline's telltale signs, separating symptoms from causes, and making one change at a time. This isn't a tutorial on a specific tool. It's a mindset. You'll learn to ask the right questions of your profiler, and to know when the profiler is lying to you. Why Your Frame Time Is a Crime Scene The 16.