Project Idea - Builtin GPU profiler

randall · Post by **randall** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 4:48 pm

My idea is to write GPU profiler for Ogre. It would support OpenGL and Direct3D. It would get data from GPU counters and plot various stats and graphs in Ogre application. Something similar that Unigine engine has (www.unigine.com)

What do you think?

Post by **sinbad** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 5:37 pm

What benefits would this offer over existing tools like nvPerfHUD?

randall · Post by **randall** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:40 pm

support for all platforms and 3D APIs that Ogre supports

Post by **xavier** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 9:36 pm

The issue is that you need instrumented drivers for these counters to be available -- they are not available in the retail drivers. I also am not sure if they are available at the user level -- you might need to have kernel-level support to get at the counters.

ATI also has a performance analysis suite similar to nVidia's.

Lioric · Post by **Lioric** » Sat Mar 24, 2007 6:57 pm

Probably a better approach to your project is to add a "Frame Debugger" class, to be able to "single step" the frame rendering process

In this case the "designer" can easily spot rendering problems (i.e. transparency sort, overdraw, polygon load) at a higher level, and at an early stage of the media creation

Using hotkeys binded to the graphic debugger, the artist/designer can pause the rendering, and render the frame in steps, by object, by batch, by renderqueue, solids, transparents, and get information about each of those steps

The difference is that while more low-level tools are available (as NVPerf) they are not targeted to the artists part of the teams