Yeah, around 3x slower is what I've seen when I was still working on reasonably big (around a million lines of 'orthodox C++' code) PC games until around 2020 with MSVC and without stdlib usage.
This was building the entire game code with the same build options though, we didn't bother to build parts of the code in release mode and parts in debug mode, since debug performance was fast enough for the game to still run in realtime. We also didn't use a big integrated engine like UE, only some specialized middleware libraries that were integrated into the build as source code.
We did spend quite some effort to keep both build time and debug performance under control. The few cases were debug performance became unacceptable were usually caused by 'accidentially exponential' problems.
> Most of the computation is on GPU
Not in our case, the GPU was only used for rendering. All game logic was running on the CPU. IIRC the biggest chunk was pathfinding and visibility/collision/hit checks (e.g. all sorts of NxM situations in the lower levels of the mob AI).
Ah okay, then that makes sense. It really depends on your build system. My natural inclination would be to not have a pathfinding system in DEBUG unless I was actively working on it. But it's not always very easy to set things up to be that way
This was building the entire game code with the same build options though, we didn't bother to build parts of the code in release mode and parts in debug mode, since debug performance was fast enough for the game to still run in realtime. We also didn't use a big integrated engine like UE, only some specialized middleware libraries that were integrated into the build as source code.
We did spend quite some effort to keep both build time and debug performance under control. The few cases were debug performance became unacceptable were usually caused by 'accidentially exponential' problems.
> Most of the computation is on GPU
Not in our case, the GPU was only used for rendering. All game logic was running on the CPU. IIRC the biggest chunk was pathfinding and visibility/collision/hit checks (e.g. all sorts of NxM situations in the lower levels of the mob AI).