GPU Memory Reads
Description
The GPU Memory Reads metric represents the number of bytes read from GPU memory. For example, GPU memory is used for render targets and for loading textures.
NOTE
On Intel® HD Graphics 2500/4000: to access this metric, you must explicitly enable the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers option in your BIOS settings:
-
Select Advanced
-
Select System Agent (SA) Configuration
-
Select Graphics Configuration
-
Reboot your machine
If the BIOS on your system does not include the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers option, update your BIOS to the latest version from Intel. After completing your performance monitoring activity, we recommend that you disable the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers BIOS option and reboot your machine.
Examples
If GPU Memory Reads is 640,000,000, it means 640,000,000 bytes were read from GPU memory.
Improving Performance
GPU memory reads are performed by multiple graphics operations. Some ways to reduce the number of GPU memory reads include:
- Reducing the number of rendering passes
- Reducing the size of textures, by using a lower resolution or lower color precision (such as RGBA4444 instead of RGBA8888)
- Using texture compression to reduce the amount of memory to transfer textures
- Using mipmapping, so that smaller textures (mipmaps) can be used
- Reducing the number of textures in the scene
To help minimize overhead in this area, capture a typical frame while the game is running, use this frame as input to the Intel® GPA Frame Analyzer, and try one or more of the following techniques:
- the 2×2 Textures experiment (in the Experiments tab) to see if textures are a bottleneck
- the Texture tab to see the texture size, format, and mip level
NOTE
This metric is always a multiple of 64, since the Intel® HD Graphics 2500/4000 performs GPU Memory Reads transactions in terms of 64-byte cache lines.
See Also