Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) Release Notes - 2020

ID 846010
Updated 12/31/2020
Version
Public

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Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

  • Improve performance by quickly identifying problem areas.

  • Identify single frames of interest and profile them down to draw call level.

  • View real-time CPU, GPU, and graphics API performance to quickly identify improvement areas.

  • Evaluate workload performance across the CPU and GPU.

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Introduction

Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) provides tools for graphics analysis and optimizations for making games and other graphics-intensive applications run even faster. The tools support the platforms based on the latest generations of Intel® Core™ and Intel Atom® processor families, for applications developed for Windows* or Ubuntu*.

Intel® GPA provides a common and integrated user interface for collecting performance data. Using it, you can quickly see performance opportunities in your application, saving time and getting products to market faster.

Click a version to expand the summary of new features and changes for that version. Click the Release Notes links to access detailed release notes for each release, which include important information, such as pre-requisites, software compatibility, installation instructions, and known issues.

All files are in PDF format - Adobe Reader* (or compatible) required.

Versions

Release Notes

OVERVIEW

All Tools

  • Support for Intel® Iris® Xe MAX Graphics

Graphics Monitor

  • Added support for the "Auto-detect Launched Applications" option to work in Trace capture mode
  • Added support for deferring capture of a Vulkan Stream to any point in time while the application is running (Deferred Capture)
  • Added support for capturing multiple Deferred Captures of Vulkan and Direct3D* 12 during a single run

Graphics Frame Analyzer

  • Improved the quality of Direct3D 12 stream capture and playback
  • Changed the blank icon to a screenshot of the first frame of a Deferred Capture in the Open-File dialog in order to more easily identify your captures
  • Full integer values are now shown in the buffers, instead of the abbreviated scientific notation values

Graphics Trace Analyzer

  • Full support for Direct3D* 12 visualizations of synchronization primitives
    • Bezier curves tracing both the lifetime of a packet through its event calls, and dependencies between packets (wait/signal command queue calls) are shown
    • User-space ID3D12CommandQueue::Signal and ID3D12CommandQueue::Wait calls are now selected along with other dependent driver synchronization events
    • GPU to CPU synchronizations via D3D12Fence::SetEventOnCompletion are visualized on the timeline 
  • Support for multi-GPU (discrete and integrated) profiling - view metrics from both GPUs in a single capture, concurrently
  • Significantly reduced the time required to open a trace file

System Analyzer

  • Support for multi-GPU (discrete and integrated) profiling - view metrics from both GPUs simultaneously.

GPA Framework

  • Multi-frame analysis has been introduced for DirectX* 11 (Pre-Alpha Version)
  • Reduce capture overhead - Deferred Capture
    • Triggering a capture at any point of game play is now supported for Vulkan and Direct3D* 12
    • Trigger multiple captures in a single session of gameplay
    • Specify the number of frames you want to capture
  • Added support for extracting Direct3D 11 object names from metadata
  • Direct3D 11 Metadata Extractor now includes RenderTarget binding information
  • Added support for Direct3D 11 RenderTarget resource extraction
  • Added support for Direct3D 11 Intel GPU Hardware query-based metrics collection
  • Vulkan resource extractor supports extraction based on call stage flags (pre/post call execution)
  • Support for Vulkan SDK 1.2.148. Please update Vulkan SDK to build against GPA Framework.
  • Support for Windows SDK 19041. Maintains backward compatibility with the previous SDK.

Release Notes

OVERVIEW

All Tools

  • Future support already enabled for the recently announced 11th Gen Intel® Core™ processors with Intel® Iris® Xe graphics

Graphics Frame Analyzer

  • Variable Rate Shading (VRS) Tier2 support in Multi-frame Profiling View mode. Including screen-space visualization of the VRS image
  • Microsoft DirectX* Raytracing Alpha support in Multi-frame Profiling View mode
  • Initial support for Multi-GPU applications in Multi-frame Profiling View mode
  • Added Microsoft Direct3D* 12 Command List debug regions and markers to API Log and Bar Chart
  • Different types of Direct3D 12 Command Queues now explicitly shown in Multi-frame Profiling View
  • Increased precision of floating point data buffers
     

Graphics Trace Analyzer

  • DirectX Raytracing calls are now displayed in the thread tracks
  • Added auto-highlighting of events to make CPU and GPU synchronization more transparent. When you select a synchronization event, all events that are related to it are highlighted as well
    • CPU synchronization with SetEvent and WaitForSingle(Multiple)Object(s)
    • GPU synchronization with DirectX 12 command queue Signal/Wait calls
  • See our first two Graphics Trace Analyzer Deep Dive videos - more to come!

System Analyzer

  • Increased the quality of CPU metrics on Windows* by significantly increasing the granularity of CPU counters for Intel hardware

GPA Framework

  • Support for DirectX* 12 Variable Rate Shading Tier2
  • Support for DirectX* Raytracing (Alpha)
  • Deferred capture support for Vulkan was extended to cover more Unity* and Unreal* based workloads

Release Notes

OVERVIEW

Graphics Monitor

  • Unlimited customizable trigger enhancements
  • User interface improvements with the ability to connect System Analyzer to a running application directly in the tool

Graphics Frame Analyzer

  • Multi-step metric collection allowing for visualization on already collected metric values while other metrics are being collected
  • Tool startup time is reduced

Graphics Trace Analyzer

  • CPU Frames tracks for multi-context/multi-queue DirectX11, DirectX12, and Vulkan applications
  • Metrics are saved into a trace file on Ubuntu

System Analyzer

  • New System Analyzer user interface enabled by default containing Pause mode, the addition of Frame and Trace capture buttons, Intel Grapics GPU query based metrics and more!