The performance panel
Your live read-out of how fast DNA is running and where its memory is going.
The Performance panel is the dashboard you glance at while you build. It tells you how smoothly your graph is playing back, how long each frame is taking, and how much GPU, CPU, and disk memory your project is using right now. When something starts to chug, this is the first place to look.
The frame-time graph
The big graph at the top plots the last couple of seconds of frame times as a row of bars, newest on the right. Each bar is how long one frame took to draw, including the time spent cooking your graph.
The colours tell the story at a glance:
Green — comfortably fast (120fps or better).
Blue — smooth (around 60fps).
Yellow — getting heavy (below 60fps).
Red — struggling (below 30fps).
Two faint reference lines mark the 60fps and 120fps targets so you can see how close you are without reading numbers. A wall of green with the occasional yellow spike is healthy. A solid block of red means something in your graph needs attention.
Watch the graph while you scrub the The timeline or tweak a parameter. A single tall red bar right after a change tells you which edit was expensive to cook.
The metrics rows
Below the graph is a stack of labelled numbers:
FPS — frames per second right now. Colour-coded the same way as the graph.
Avg / Min / Max — the average, fastest, and slowest frame times (in milliseconds) across the recent history. A low Avg with an occasional high Max means you have smooth playback with intermittent hitches.
Draws / Tris — how many draw calls and triangles the renderer pushed this frame. Big scenes with lots of geometry climb here.
Lower frame times are better — 16.67ms is one 60fps frame, 8.33ms is one 120fps frame.
Frame time and cook time overlap. During playback, the time spent cooking your graph is part of each frame, so a heavy simulation or expensive Expression shows up directly in the graph.
Memory by tier
Underneath the metrics is a breakdown of memory across three tiers, each shown as used / budget with a percentage:
GPU — textures, geometry buffers, render targets, and everything the renderer holds on the graphics card.
CPU — cached cooks, loaded media, and working data held in system memory.
Disk — cached files on your drive (appears once enabled).
Total — the combined figure across the wired tiers.
A tier turns yellow past 80% of its budget and red past 95%, so you can spot a tier filling up before it becomes a problem.
Click a tier to expand it and see the per-category breakdown — which kinds of data are taking the most room, sorted largest first. This is the fastest way to find out why memory is high, not just that it is.
Pressure badges
The OS Pressure row is a single badge summarising how hard your whole machine is being pushed for memory:
Normal (green) — plenty of headroom.
Warning (yellow) — memory is tight; DNA may start trimming caches to cope.
Critical (red) — the system is under real strain. Expect cache evictions, slower cooks, and possible instability.
If you see Warning or Critical regularly, it is a strong signal to lighten the project — see Making it faster and Memory & budgets.
A Critical badge is not just cosmetic. When the system runs out of memory headroom, DNA has to discard cached results to keep going, which means previously instant cooks suddenly become slow again. Treat it as a prompt to reduce resolution, simplify heavy nodes, or close other apps.