Has the GPU Usage profiler for Android ever worked? (Vulkan)

I posted about the GPU Usage profiler being broken a while ago and since then haven't used it at all.

Today I tried it again in the new beta and I can say that it no longer crashes like it used to when you start recording!

The GPU Usage inspector shows the correct number of drawcalls, however there is no information about how long anything took at all. Everything just says 0ms. I enabled 'Frame Timing Stats' and it didn't work. The closest I've come to making it work is turning on Multithreaded Rendering, Rendering API to Vulkan and frame timing stats to true.

That gives me...something.. I have a scene with a high vertex count cube that turns on and off. Here is what the GPU usage looks like:



Each spike is...around 1800ms. Which is incorrect. My scene doesn't run that slow, infact there is so much time left over that we perform VSync aswell (All that yellow in CPU Usage is VSync). Also, the spike is listed under 'other'. It doesn't actually provide any information.

The breakdown looks correct. I see the correct number of drag calls and such..



But there is no time associated with any of it.

When I sort by GPU ms the supposed 1807.05ms frame time cost doesn't even come up anywhere.

 

Seems like the timing aspect of the profiler is completely busted


I just can't get anything reasonable from it no matter what I do.

 

The "GPU Usage" tile contains an warning icon in the lower-right corner. Does it show a tooltip and what does it say?

 

Yep, it is just a warning stating that gathering timing statistics may impact performance.

 

Where do you turn on frame timing stats? I will try this on some devices, too, to see if it works anywhere.

 

Hey there

Player stats, near where you turn on dynamic batching, multithreaded rendering, etc.

My test device was a Pixel XL.

 

Any luck @Claytonious ?

 

I assume you mean Player Settings (that's where multithreaded rendering is) and I see no such option there:


But I'm trying some dev builds on a few devices anyway...

 

Bump..

 

Hi,

Yes, the GPU profiler is broken on Vulkan, mostly due to the fact Vulkan is designed.

When the GPU profiler was implemented back in the day, it was based on the assumption that we could measure how long each draw call takes. This was and is a valid assumption on normal forward-rendering GPUs, such as desktop GPUs. However, on a tile-based GPU (as most mobiles are), the work required to perform single draw call gets spread out to wider time, typically over multiple frames, so asking how long a single draw call takes doesn't quite make sense there.

As Vulkan API was designed to target both forward-rendering desktop GPUs and tile-based mobile GPUs, it sets some limitations on what you can do when you're "inside a renderpass", which means while you're rendering geometry and not switching rendertargets. In Vulkan, it is only possible to measure the time each renderpass takes, so what you're seeing is a result of that.

There is very little we can do to fix that (other than disable GPU profiling on Vulkan completely) at least on the current GPU profiler design.

 

Bummer .. so there is no way to profile shader performance on Android, then? When I use OpenGL3 the profiler says that GPU profiler is not supported, which is why I have been trying with Vulkan since thats the only way I can get the GPU profiler to show anything at all.

We've been having a lot of issues profiling shaders. We can never get a clear read on how performant one version of a shader is to another. On iOS you can just capture the frame and xcode will tell you exactly how many Ms each drawcall took, but I don't have easy access to an iOS development environment not to mention that it still doesn't tell me exactly how well/badly my shaders are running on an Android device. (Some operation that is fast on Metal/Apple hardware might be slower on Android). There is just no way to know.

 

@Prodigga , I still never found that option mentioned above. Would still be happy to try on a few more devices to see if any of them will work (so at least we could profile on *some* Android devices). (See my screenshot and message above).

 

...hello? @strandborg

@Claytonious I'm not sure my dude. I didn't do anything to make that option visible, it was just there. I am on the beta, though?

 

This is a little difficult to use, though: you can profile GPU Clock Cycles for each draw call, from which you can back into figuring out which shader was involved in that draw call, but it's a *lot* work, and turning GPU Clock Cycles into time is not trivial at all. You can force the device into "non throttled" mode temporarily to make this a little easier, but it's still manual conversion.

It would be FAR preferred to simply have Unity's time profiling for draw calls work on these devices.