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/Ox (Enable Most Speed Optimizations)

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The /Ox compiler option enables a combination of optimizations that favor speed. In some versions of the Visual Studio IDE and the compiler help message, it's called full optimization, but the /Ox compiler option enables only a subset of the speed optimization options enabled by /O2.

Syntax

/Ox

Remarks

The /Ox compiler option enables the /O compiler options that favor speed. The /Ox compiler option doesn't include the additional /GF (Eliminate Duplicate Strings) and /Gy (Enable Function-Level Linking) options enabled by /O1 or /O2 (Minimize Size, Maximize Speed). The additional options applied by /O1 and /O2 can cause pointers to strings or to functions to share a target address, which can affect debugging and strict language conformance. The /Ox option is an easy way to enable most optimizations without including /GF and /Gy. For more information, see the descriptions of the /GF and /Gy options.

The /Ox compiler option is the same as using the following options in combination:

/Ox is mutually exclusive from:

You can cancel the bias toward speed of the /Ox compiler option if you specify /Oxs, which combines the /Ox compiler option with /Os (Favor Small Code). The combined options favor smaller code size. The /Oxs option is exactly the same as specifying /Ox /Os when the options appear in that order.

To apply all available file-level optimizations for release builds, we recommend you specify /O2 (Maximize Speed) instead of /Ox, and /O1 (Minimize Size) instead of /Oxs. For even more optimization in release builds, also consider the /GL (Whole Program Optimization) compiler option and /LTCG (Link-time Code Generation) linker option.

To set this compiler option in the Visual Studio development environment

  1. Open the project's Property Pages dialog box. For details, see Set C++ compiler and build properties in Visual Studio.

  2. Select the Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Optimization property page.

  3. Modify the Optimization property.

To set this compiler option programmatically

See also

/O Options (Optimize Code)
MSVC Compiler Options
MSVC Compiler Command-Line Syntax