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When can we expect gpu profiling?

Discussion in 'PSM' started by FranckS, Jul 15, 2014.

  1. FranckS

    FranckS

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    Jan 14, 2014
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    It's all in the tile :)
     
    FranckS, Jul 15, 2014
    #1

  2. eriQue

    eriQue

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    May 25, 2010
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    Depends on what you mean by "GPU profiling".

    1. A dedicated 'hardware' GPU profiling/debugging suite - most probably never (since it doesn't exist for PSM in general).
    2. Support for TDBR architectures in the Unity Profiler - hopefully at some point, but that is outside the 'Unity for PSM' domain
    3. Support for PSM, which is TDBR architecture, in Unity Profiler - depends primarily on (2), but also if we can get the necessary data from the platform itself (which we can't today).
     
    eriQue, Jul 15, 2014
    #2

  3. FranckS

    FranckS

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    Thanks eriQue.

    General support for TDBR chips would be nice already. I have very few experiences with deferred architectures and to me right now it's a bit more difficult to anticipate than forward gpus.

    What I'd like to know when my gpu stalls is roughly where the bottleneck comes from. Like too many verts (or too long vert shaders), or too long pixel shaders, or too much texture fetches or memory bandwidth usage. Right know it's pretty much guesswork.
     
    FranckS, Jul 15, 2014
    #3

  4. eriQue

    eriQue

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    May 25, 2010
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    Yeah, I completely understand. Unfortunately with PSM our hands are tied a bit, since there is no 'native' GPU profiler available for PSM that we could piggyback on (i.e. to way to get hardware counters or similar).
    Currently the best bet is probably to use iOS or Android (with SGX chipset), and use the native profilers available there (XCode and PVRTune respectively).
    Some things can also be deduced by running manual "what-if" experiments (like, replace the vertex or fragment with something simpler, calculate overdraw ratios etc) to get an understanding where the bottle neck is.
     
    eriQue, Jul 15, 2014
    #4