Evaluation of CPU and  Memory performance between Object-oriented Design and Data-oriented Design in Mobile games

Abstract: The popularity that mobile games gained recently gives the opportunity to develop more mobile games. Limited by the scarce resources on mobile phones, developing good games becomes critical and requires special optimization while choosing the design approach.   Object-oriented Design (OOD) and Data-oriented Design (DOD) are two programming paradigms that have different ways of defining and structuring data. The purpose of this student thesis is to investigate the CPU and Memory performance differences between the two approaches.   To answer the research questions an experiment is conducted where two identical mobile games are built, one according to OOD and the other to DOD to collect empirical quantitative data and compare the results. The study limits the scope by  running the games on Android mobile phones.   The results of comparing the CPU Usage show significant differences especially when the amount of data is large. For instance, in the DOD version of the game, the CPU spends 20.9% of the time on updating data, while it spends 69.2% of the time on the same action in the OOD version of the game. No significant differences are observed regarding the total Memory allocated for the games in both versions. It can therefore be concluded that when the number of objects/data is big, a more optimized code should be written following the Data oriented Design approach with regard to better CPU and Memory Usage and    better game performance.