Live GPU Profiling

Hi there,

I would like to know what is the best way to do GPU profiling (get the time-stamp between two point in time during the rendering)…

For DirectX11 I found the following function in the CommandList.Direct3D.cs (in SiliconStudio.Xenko.Graphics):

/// <summary>
/// Begins profiling.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="profileColor">Color of the profile.</param>
/// <param name="name">The name.</param>
public unsafe void BeginProfile(Color4 profileColor, string name)
{
    if (nativeDeviceProfiler != null)
    {
        nativeDeviceProfiler.BeginEvent(name);
    }
}

I am guessing that this is for hooking an external perf analyser like PIX, however I would really like to get the time-stamps directly in the game and display it in the HUD instead…

Thanks in advance.

There is a profiler script that you can create by default in the Add Asset -> Script -> Profiler
You can toggle it on with ctrl + alt + P in the game.

It does not give the most details, but it’ll give you batches etc etc…

How does it work for timing GPU commands in a deferred context (when the commands are not executed immediately but submitted at once to the graphics device) ?

I’m afraid I cannot answer that. Since I do not know this in depth.

We have some work in progress that make those BeginProfile calls also read back the GPU timings (using GPU queries), and use them with the existing Profiler system.

If I understood correctly, that’s what you want, right?

Yes that’s exactly what I want to do, but I ended up implementing it myself, was not so hard to do GPU queries with Xenko and I only use DX11 so it took me very little time.

If you are guys are interested I could share the code with you, do you guys accept pull requests ?