25 September 2012

Profiling OpenGL applications with ApiTrace

During the last 6 months I had the pleasure of supervising James Benton at VMware, for his industrial placement that is part of his course at Imperial College London.

Among other things, he added to support to ApiTrace for GPU profiling of OpenGL traces, and visualize both the captured GPU/CPU profiling results.

Visualization currently consists of a timeline showing calls start CPU/GPU time and durations, where GPU timings are grouped by the GLSL program bound:


And a histogram showing GPU/CPU durations for each call:


The interface was slightly retrouched since this screen-shots were taken.

Much more can be done (especially with cooperation from OpenGL driver developers to expose more GPU counters to OpenGL applications), but we are confident this new feature already can be quite handy for those looking for improving performance of their OpenGL applications.

James also designed a new homepage for ApiTrace on GitHub Pages. Please update your bookmarks!

10 March 2012

ApiTrace 3.0

The Apitrace project came a long way since the first and last time I wrote about it here. One obvious reason is that I don't blog much (has it really been four years already!?). But the main reason is that this project received love from a lot of people since then, gaining features I could never dream of.

First, Zack Rusin implemented an awesome GUI and made writing/reading huge traces blazing fast.

Now, Carl Worth from Intel Linux Graphics Driver team implemented a top-level command, replacing the assortment of programs and scripts of with an unified command line interface, in the same spirit as git or Linux perf tool. He also added ability to trim traces, and is working on automatically trimming traces.

LunarG is developing several services based on Apitrace for GLES on Android and Chia-I Wu contributed back trace and retrace support for EGL, GLES1, and GLES2 APIs on Linux. Alexandros Frantzis from Linaro and Arnaud Vrac improved portability for embedded Linux platforms.

More goodies are bound to come soon, so stay tuned... to the github repository, not this blog! ;-)