C# delegate performance in xna game

Question

I am currently developing a C# .net xna game engine.

I have been trying to figure out a way to have an update manager / scheduler / event system. I currently am using delegates to provide a way to create dynamic scheduled tasks and events.

I have recently read that delegates can be slow. The delegates in my game are being invoked every frame and I was wondering if there can be a performance hit from that?

Update:

I also just found this http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2007/07/09/delegates-events-and-garbage.aspx

This is what I was worried about, and I guess there can be a way around it. Thanks for all the other information.

Answer 1

Don't worry about it - delegates are slightly slower than a regular function call but unless you're calling them several million times a second I very much doubt that you would notice.

I'd suggest sticking with delegates unless it proves to be a bottleneck.

Answer 2

Regardless of whether there can be a performance hit, the better question is whether or not there is a performance hit. You should measure the performance of the application with and without the delegates to determine whether any performance hit is acceptable.

Answer 3

There's obviously some perf hit with a delegate vs. a direct method call, but with modern (read: post v1.1) versions of the CLR, it is about as fast as a method call via an interface.

Here is a table of rough perf measures: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507639.aspx

As always, you should measure to see if performance is acceptable to you. As I've used delegates in performance-critical code (animation) and not experienced problems, I'd expect it to work out ok for you.