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!