GPU Performance

Doing performance work with GPUs is harder than with CPUs because of the asynchronous and massively parallel architecture.

Tools

PIX - Can do timing of Direct3D calls. Works reasonably well with Firefox.

NVIDIA PerfHUD - Last I checked required a special build to be used.

NVIDIA Parallel Nsight - Haven\'t tried.

AMD GPU ShaderAnalyzer - Will compile a shader and show the machine code and give static pipeline estimations. Not that useful for Firefox because all of our shaders are pretty simple.

AMD GPU PerfStudio - I had trouble getting this to work, and can\'t remember whether I actually did or not.

Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers

• Haven\'t tried.

APITrace

• Open source, works OK.

PVRTrace

• Doesn\'t seem to emit traces on android/Nexus S. Looks like it\'s

designed for X11-based linux-ARM devices, OMAP3 is mentioned a lot in the docs \...

Guides

[Accurately Profiling Direct3D API Calls (Direct3D 9)](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb172234%28v=vs.85%29.aspx "http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb172234(v=vs.85).aspx") Suggests avoiding normal profilers like xperf and instead measuring the time to flush the command buffer.

[OS X - Best Practices for Working with Texture Data](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/OpenGL-MacProgGuide/opengltexturedata/opengltexturedata.html "http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/OpenGL-MacProgGuide/opengltexturedata/opengltexturedata.html")

• Sort of old, but still useful.