Wookash Podcast Deep dive on profilers! | Dennis (Telemetry) & Ritesh (Superluminal)
Nov 29, 2025
Dennis Gustafsson, a game developer with 25 years of experience, and Ritesh Oedayrajsingh Varma, co-founder of Superluminal, delve into the world of profilers. They explore the differences between sampling and instrumentation profilers, discussing when to use each. Dennis shares insights on early visual profiling techniques from the Amiga era. Ritesh reveals Superluminal's innovative streaming architecture, enabling efficient handling of large capture data. They also highlight strategies for efficient GPU profiling and the importance of visual timelines in multithreading.
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Why Superluminal Was Born
- Ritesh recounts starting Superluminal in 2017 because existing profilers felt inadequate for their needs.
- He and his cofounder built the product to iterate on features for seven years while remaining a two-person team.
Amiga Palette Visual Profiling
- Dennis remembers using the Amiga palette trick to visually measure code time by changing colors while the CRT beam swept the screen.
- That low-overhead visual profiling shaped his preference for timeline-based instrumentation later in his career.
Sampling Loses The Time Dimension
- Sampling profilers collapse samples into a single call graph and lose the time dimension, hiding per-frame spikes.
- For games, instrumentation preserved frame-level timelines and remained more useful historically.