Overview
Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) are tools that help game developers analyze and optimize games and graphics intensive applications. The analyzers provide a common and integrated user interface for collecting performance data. Intel® GPA is a suite of software tools that provides platform-level game performance analysis to help you optimize application performance.
This document provides an overview of the tools, describes their main features and how to use them. Use Intel GPA to analyze the performance of your games and graphic-intensive applications, understand exactly what is happening when rendering a frame, and perform various «what-if» experiments, without changing your application code.
For information on the supported environments and other important information on installing and using Intel GPA, see the Release Notes file in the installation package.
Intel® GPA contains the following components:
- Intel® GPA Monitor: enables you to launch applications, automatically detect launched applications, set tracing options, configure Heads-up Display mode and set keyboard shortcuts. With the Intel GPA Monitor you can set up a trigger of a certain profile and enable domains that you wish to trace. This tool enables you to track media metrics in real-time while running your application. Metrics include GPU utilization with break-down to GPU engines and types of media operations. Run the Intel GPA Monitor even if the analyzed application runs on the same machine on which the Intel GPA tools are installed (in this case, use ‘<This Machine>’ as the network address).
- Intel® GPA System Analyzer HUD (Heads-Up Display): collects and displays hardware and software metrics data from your application in real time, and enables experimentation via Microsoft* Direct3D pipeline state overrides. Use this tool to understand the high-level performance profile of your graphics application, and determine whether your application is CPU bound or GPU bound.
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For a GPU bound application, use the Intel® GPA Frame Analyzer to analyze a captured frame with a low frame rate.
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For a CPU-bound application, use the Intel® GPA Platform Analyzer to show how the various CPU tasks within your application are executed.
This tool also enables you to create Intel® Graphic Checker data capture files for further analysis with the Intel® Graphics Checker software assessment tool. Press Ctrl+F1 in the HUD to see the keyboard-shortcut list.
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- Intel® GPA System Analyzer (New!) This remote version of the Intel GPA System Analyzer HUD allows Client/Target analysis over a network connection, enabling minimum overhead on platforms with limited resources such as Netbooks. In addition, the Intel GPA System Analyzer can be used for local profiling with dual monitors or non-full screen applications. It provides some additional features over the HUD, including the ability to graph more metrics simultaneously, and convenient drag and drop for adding new metrics. See also Why Would I Want to Use the Intel® GPA System Analyzer?
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Intel® GPA Frame Analyzer: provides a detailed view of a captured frame file, which contains all Microsoft DirectX* context used to render the selected 3D frame, as well as per-draw call/region GPU metrics. This tool enables you to understand the performance of your application at the frame level, render target level, and draw call level. It enables detailed analysis and “what if” optimization experiments without the need to recompile or rebuild your application.
- Intel® GPA Platform Analyzer: visualizes the execution profile of the various tasks in your code over time. Intel® GPA collects real-time trace data during the application run and provides a system-wide picture of the code execution on the various CPU and GPU cores in your system. The tool infrastructure automatically aligns clocks across all cores in the entire system so that you can analyze CPU-based workloads together with GPU-based workloads within a unified time domain.