We should now have all of the information we need to make sense of performance bottlenecks so that we can start to apply fixes. For the remainder of this chapter, we will cover a series of techniques to improve Rendering Pipeline performance for CPU-bound and GPU-bound applications.
The first tip involves a setting that eases the burden on the CPU or GPU Front End at the expense of the other, that is, GPU Skinning. Skinning is the process where mesh vertices are transformed based on the current location of their animated bones. The animation system, working on the CPU, transforms the object's bones that are used to determine its current pose, but the next important step in the animation process is wrapping the mesh vertices around those bones to place the mesh in the final pose. This is achieved by iterating over each vertex and performing a weighted average against the bones connected to those vertices.
This vertex processing task...