Tag Archives: profiling

Seven Things for June 6th

It’s D-Day and it’s been awhile, so let’s get going. This is a LIFO of the 486 backlogged links I’ve collected for this blog:

  • GPUView looks like an interesting profiling tool from some students at Stanford (done as interns at Microsoft, which has a more official page), though I’ve heard it’s a bit of work to set up. If you’ve used it, how did you find it?
  • Open source code for a fast and scalable GLSL GPU implementation of the Perlin noise with functions, not textures.
  • NV Path Rendering is not what you might think, it’s about rendering text and 2D paths with quite a bit of elaboration available (think SVG or other 2D vector descriptions). GTC presentation here.
  • The book “Physically Based Rendering” is now in eBook form, including PDF (so I assume no DRM?). Annoyingly, it costs considerably more than the physical book on Amazon, but that’s the publisher’s doing.
  • Proland looked intriguing, a procedural terrain generator that creates based on view. Appears fairly elaborate, and a quick way to get some plausible-looking terrain data.
  • Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmarking system; from what I’ve heard, mobile platforms kind of set the clock back a fair number of year in terms of performance. Still, 3D is doable (it certainly was in 2002); here’s a starter list of 3D CAD apps for Android (many are on the iPad, too). I need to search out more, I’m interested in what’s out there.
  • Finally, in the category “this looks like a painting but is reality”, a photo taken in Namibia:

gDEBugger is now free!

Just noticed this on Morgan McGuire’s twitter feed. I don’t know why, but gDEBugger, sort of the PIX equivalent for OpenGL, is now free, go here for a license. They’ll be putting out a newer free version (5.8) by the end of the year, so it’s not like they’re discontinuing the product. Maybe it’s the “get them hooked” business model. Also, there’s talk that the current version doesn’t work that well with OpenGL 3.2 and above. Nonetheless, it’s an excellent product overall. Anyway, screen shots here.

To quote their literature: gDEBugger is an OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenCL Debugger, Profiler and memory analyzer. It traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API to provide the application behavior information you need to find bugs and to optimize application performance. gDEBugger transforms the debugging task of graphic application from a “Black box” into a White box model; using gDEBugger you can peer inside the OpenGL usage to see how individual commands affect the graphic pipeline implementation. gDEBugger has a lot of “standard debugger” abilities, but also contains many special features for graphics software developers: view render context state variables, view allocated textures, textures properties and image data, Shaders programs and source code, break on OpenGL errors. In addition, using its profiling abilities, gDEBugger enables you to pinpoint easily the exact location of the application’s graphic pipeline performance bottleneck to let you optimize the application performance.

Update: Jari Komppa wrote, “This may shed some light on things: http://www.export.gov.il/Eng/_Articles/Article.asp?CategoryID=461&ArticleID=12274

Full text:

AMD to buy Israel’s Graphic Remedy company

The American chip manufacturer AMD is buying Israel’s Graphic Remedy company, the Calcalist financial website reports.

It appears that AMD – Intel’s competitor in manufacturing PC and server chips – will pay a relatively low amount for Graphic Remedy, some $4-5 million.

Graphic Remedy, founded six years ago, is a small company with seven employees. It gained renown for its series of simulation and debugging applications for graphic programs and computer games and became dominant among Cronus’ [sic – they mean Khronos Group’s] Open GL platform developers.

According to Calcalist, AMD seems to be buying Graphic Remedy in an attempt to expand its presence in the home and business graphic
processors market.