Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers Knowledge Base

This article contains the online version of the Release Notes for the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers product (Intel® GPA). This document provides system requirements, installation instructions, issues and limitations, and legal information.

Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) is a powerful, agile developer tool suite for analyzing and optimizing games, media, and graphics-intensive applications. Available now, Intel GPA 2012 R3 adds new features requested by game developers.

Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) includes various features that help game developers optimize their game. This article shows how to use the Pixel History and Overdraw modes to analyze "hot spots" within your game or application.

Recently added to Intel GPA are the Frame Advisor and Erg Advisor tools, which sort through your metrics data to quickly pinpoint specific issues within your frame. The tools highlight areas most likely to result in improving the playability of your game.

In order to focus efforts on newer operating systems and technologies, the Intel GPA tools no longer support Microsoft Windows XP* or Microsoft Windows Vista*. This article describes the OS support for the product.

Intel® GPA Platform Analyzer is an instrumentation-based tool. The Intel® GPA instrumentation API provides functionality to describe various constructs such as dependencies between tasks. This paper describes how to instrument your code to use this tool.

Game analysis and optimization is critical, and the complexity of modern GPU's makes this task even more difficult. Intel GPA includes two "advisors" that automate the process of identifying the most likely causes of performance issues in a frame.

This article describes a limitation with the Intel® GPA System Analyzer HUD. When analyzing an application you can't change the monitor or change from windowed mode to full screen mode (or vice versa). We provide suggestions for avoiding this limitation.

Intel GPA Frame Analyzer allows the user to save the a render target image to disk for later analysis. In some cases the resulting image is not what you expected. This article describes the issue and various alternatives for getting what you want.

This case study demonstrates how the performance of Section 8: Prejudice was increased 1.17x, from 24FPS to 28FPS on 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor family using the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA) on the game’s built-in benchmark scene.

This article describes the behavior of Intel® GPA on netbooks based on Intel® processors and chipsets. Using Intel GPA with the latest graphics drivers now allows you to analyze and optimize your game on these platforms.

Under some situations Intel® encounters an error when trying to install prerequisites (such as the Microsoft DirectX* runtime libraries). This article provides a workaround for the issue.

Sid Meier’s Civilization* series has a successful 20-year history. This white paper describes how Firaxis utilized Intel® GPA to ensure Civilization V (Civ5) offers the best possible mix of graphics & game performance for the vast majority of systems.