Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2

At GDC 2018 we talked about a new version of RGP that would interoperate with RenderDoc, allowing the two tools to communicate and improve combined debugging and performance analysis workflows when working with modern explicit graphics APIs.

We’re ready to set the first beta implementation free today with the release of RGP 1.2, letting developers use it and provide feedback to help AMD and Baldur improve the experience and improve how the two tools work together.

The functionality is built on top of specific support release in our very latest GPU driver, so make sure you have downloaded and installed it! Let’s take a closer look at the bigger changes in 1.2.

Changes in 1.2

The RGP and RenderDoc beta interop functionality lets an RGP profile be triggered from RenderDoc, and if you select an event in either RGP or RenderDoc then it will also be displayed in the other tool, so you can keep your view of what you’re looking at in sync between them.

On the RenderDoc side, you need a recent nightly build of RenderDoc from the v1.x branch to get the functionality there.

RGP now also shows present events in the System Activity section of the UI, so you can disambiguate those from the rest of the per-frame work happening on the GPU. That functionality is also reliant on the latest Radeon GPU driver, giving you a second excuse to install it!

There’s also a way to find an event’s parent command buffer in the System Activity panel, and to go partly in the other direction to find the first GPU event generated by any given command buffer you’re interested in. Both of those features will help you navigate what’s usually a complex chain of command buffer-generated events.

Lastly in terms of user-visible features, one of my personal favourites: if our driver had to insert a barrier on your behalf for any reason, we now show you what that reason was in plain English language right there in the Barriers pane, and also in the event-specific details if you’ve selected a barrier event in the Events pane.

Sshhh…that sound you can hear is the quiet rejoicing of thousands of graphics developers who are now able to differentiate between their own app-submitted barriers and those we had to put in there too. Beautiful.

More information

As always, you can find out more about RGP, including links to the release binaries on GitHub and the full release notes list, on our product page. As always: please send us any and all feedback so that we can keep making RGP the very best developer-focused performance analysis tool for modern graphics work.