Intel Software Network articles Feed

Intel® GPA Tip: Workaround for games that trap all keystrokes

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:00:00 -0700

Some games and applications trap all keystrokes, so keyboard shortcuts within Intel GPA System Analyzer/HUD will not work.

If you want to capture frames or traces you have two choices when using the Intel GPA System Analyzer/HUD: (1) use the “capture” button of Intel GPA System Analyzer / Standalone instead of Intel GPA System Analyzer/HUD, or (2) define a trigger to automatically capture a frame or trace when certain conditions occur (such as FPS < 20).

If you decide to use System Analyzer / Standalone, we recommend that you run this client from another machine in order to minimize the impact on the target system.

04-17-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

Performance Analysis

When using Intel GPA System Analyzer / HUD, keyboard shortcuts may not work because the game is trapping all keystrokes. This article describes a workaround for this situation.

Introducing the Intel GPA Advisor

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:00:00 -0800

As a game developer you want to provide a compelling user experience on every platform that you target. But this usually involves becoming an expert in knowing every little detail of a platform's GPU architecture, which is time-consuming due to a typically steep learning curve. Plus, the complexity of GPUs continues to increase with every new generation of graphics systems.

So it's no surprise that the Intel GPA team hears feedback from users similar to the following: "You've given me lots of metrics data that shows what's happening deep within the GPU and the individual stages of the rendering pipeline. But how do I sort through all of this data and figure out how to use it to improve my game's performance?" To help answer these questions, Intel® GPA has added two "advisors" -- Frame Advisor and Erg Advisor. In a nutshell, each of these tools is an expert system that helps you find problems in your frames. Intel® GPA Frame Analyzer already provides a lot of metrics data, but these advisors can automatically sift through this data and highlight potential areas of concern.

In this video we'll go "under the hood" to show you how to use these tools as part of your optimization process. For more information about these tools, see this KB article. To learn more about Intel GPA in general, check out the Intel GPA Home Page.

12-20-2011

Videos

Intel GPA Advisor is a beta feature in Intel GPA. Joe Everton introduces this video describing the capabilities of this addition to the Frame Analyzer and Judy Hartley explains the UI and key elements of this component during this quick, 5 minute tour.

Intel® GPA Tip: Some Suggestions for Learning About Intel® GPA

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 23:00:00 -0700

Hello!

Starting to use a new tool is never easy, as there are lots of new terms and concepts to learn before you become proficient with the tool. And you've probably been using other tools or procedures that do things differently, which makes switching even more difficult. So the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) product team is trying to make the learning process as easy as possible.

First of all, start with the Intel GPA Product Brief, as well as the Intel GPA FAQ. These two documents provide high-level information about the product -- you'll see what the product can do, and learn how some of the key game developers have adopted Intel GPA as part of their analysis and optimization process.

However, while the Product Brief and the FAQ documents are great for learning what Intel GPA can do, they don't necessarily show you how to start using the tools. For understanding key Intel GPA concepts and the major workflows, check out these sources of information:

Intel GPA Getting Started Guide
- written for those new to Intel GPA
- presents key concepts of the product, and walks through many common workflows in a step-by-step manner
Intel GPA training videos
- present short "hands-on" videos on the use of the Intel GPA tools (with key workflows that game developers use in their day-by-day analysis and optimization tasks)
- developed without voice-over narration, these videos will be helpful even when English is not your native language
- all videos are short and focused on a single topic or workflow -- each video is typically less than five minutes

Hopefully this has given you enough information to get started using Intel GPA. If not, please check out the Intel GPA Home Page for more training material, and let us know what we can do to improve the product.

08-15-2011

01-20-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

Starting to use a new game analysis tool isn't easy, as there are lots of new terms and concepts to learn. In this article we'll show you how to quickly get up to speed with Intel® GPA -- the articles to read and where to get more information.

Intel® GPA Tip: don't change an application's monitor once System Analyzer HUD has started analyzing the app

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:00:00 -0700

Introduction

The Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) developer tool suite provides a complete toolkit for analyzing and optimizing your games, media, and other graphics-intensive applications.

This article describes a limitation of one of the tools in the Intel GPA suite, the Intel GPA System Analyzer HUD. We'll describe the limitation, then provide some suggestions to keep you from encountering the issue.

Issue Description

When using the Intel GPA System Analyzer HUD (Heads-Up Display) to analyze a game, after the HUD appears:

do not move an application's window from one monitor to another
do not change from windowed mode to full screen mode (or full screen mode to windowed mode)

In both of these situations Intel GPA may either stop running (that is, the HUD disappears), or you may see errors in the application or Intel GPA.

Workarounds

If you encounter this issue when trying to analyze a game or application with Intel GPA, there are options available to you.

Applications often provide an option to force use of a particular monitor, or to startup in windowed mode or full screen mode. You can typically do this through a command line option or using a "config file". For example, many games allow you to startup in windowed mode by appending "-window" to the command line (or "-fullscreen" for full screen mode). If no option exists for starting the application on a specific monitor, try disabling all secondary screens to force the application to run on that monitor.

To use command line options with Intel GPA, right-click on the Intel GPA Monitor in the taskbar notification area, select Analyze Application..., then in the Command Line field enter the pathname of the application and all command line options, then select Run:

Where to Next...

If this article doesn't help solve your problem, please let us know in the Intel GPA Support Forums. Also, if you have suggestions for how we can improve the product, leave us a note on the Support Forums -- we would love to hear from you!

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

08-15-2011

01-20-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

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 tip: running the tools on Intel-based netbooks

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 23:00:00 -0700

Introduction
Netbook PC's have become more than a niche player in the mobile computing marketplace. To take advantage of this trend, companies have been developing games and other graphics products targeted for this market. As one can expect, many game developers have been asking "What tools are available for optimizing my game on netbooks?"

Updates to the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers product (Intel® GPA) and Intel graphics drivers now allow you to use Intel GPA on some of the more common netbook platforms. So download the latest version of Intel GPA from the GPA Home Page and the latest version of the Intel graphics drivers from the Intel Download Site.

This article discusses what developers should expect when using Intel GPA to analyzing their game on Intel-based netbooks.

Overall Best Practices
Netbook PC's tend to have minimal resources compared to typical laptops or desktop systems. In particular, they'll have a 32-bit OS and less than 2GB of memory. This is fine for typical day-to-day use, but Intel GPA requires more resources -- analysis of frame capture files and trace capture files works best when running GPA in a client/server mode where the client has 4GB or more of memory and is running a 64-bit OS.

Intel® GPA Features Supported on GMA 950 and GMA 3150 Systems
For these systems, Intel® GPA System Analyzer will report key system and Microsoft DirectX* metrics, and Intel® GPA Frame Analyzer will report graphics rendering times for all selected draw calls. However, since this graphics chipset does not have built-in hardware metrics, Intel GPA will show larger error bars consistent with timer-based metrics.

Intel® GPA Features Supported on GMA 3650 Systems
For these systems, the graphics architecture utilizes tile-based rendering, so Intel GPA cannot provide accurate metrics for individual draw calls. So GPU-based metrics for Intel® GPA System Analyzer and Intel® GPA Frame Analyzer are restricted to metrics for entire render targets instead of individual draw calls. Also, for the Visualization Panel within Intel® GPA Frame Analyzer you are limited to viewing the data based upon render targets (that is, the "erg graph" option is not available).

Non-Supported Systems
A number of netbooks are configured with Intel® GMA 500 graphics. Typically these systems use the Intel® Atom Z processor. For these systems, Intel GPA is not able to provide metrics data, and will print an error message when you use Intel GPA on these systems.

Conclusion
Game developers using the latest version of Intel® GPA now have an option for analyzing and optimizing their games on many popular netbooks based upon Intel® netbook processors and chipsets. In particular, game developers using either Intel® GMA 950 graphics, Intel® GMA 3150 graphics, or Intel® GMA 3650 graphics can now analyze their games and optimize the playability of their product on these netbooks.

Developers targeting netbook-based systems should also see this article, which provides tips and tricks for optimizing application performance on Intel® Atom^TM processors.

See the Intel GPA Home page for download options and additional information about the product.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

08-15-2011

03-01-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

This article describes the behavior of Intel® GPA on netbooks based on Intel® processors and chipsets. Using version 4 of Intel GPA with the latest graphics drivers now allows you to analyze and optimize your game on these platforms.

Intel® GPA Tip: using multi-byte filenames

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:00:00 -0700

Introduction
Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) is a suite of tools that helps graphics developers analyze and optimize their games and applications for the PC market.

Some users may notice that multi-byte characters appear as "?" in the various dialog boxes within the tools, as well as files created by the product (such as frame capture files).

The rest of this article describes the issue and how to work around the problem.

Symptoms, Analysis, and Resolution
When using the Intel® GPA Monitor, if you use multi-byte characters in the "Analyze Application..." dialog boxes, you may notice that filenames may appear with one or more "?" instead of the characters that you expected. This may also be seen when creating frame capture or trace capture files, as these filenames by default include the name of the original application in the first part of the filename.

However, the problem only occurs when a user has a non-localized operating system version, but uses non-English letters for programs and filenames.

To resolve this problem, on Microsoft Windows 7* go to Start-> Control Panel-> Region and Language-> Administrative tab, and change the current language for non-Unicode programs to the same language as you use for programs and filenames.

Below is a screenshot of the dialog box that you will need to change:

The development team is aware of the problem, and is considering what options exist for resolving this issue in a future release of the product.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

08-15-2011

01-20-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) is a suite of tools that helps game developers analyze and optimize their games for the PC market. This technical article describes how to use multi-byte filenames with Version 4 of the product.

Intel® GPA: support for various versions of the Microsoft* Windows* OS

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:00:00 -0800

Intel® GPA support change for Microsoft Windows Operating Systems

In order to focus efforts on newer operating systems and technologies, Microsoft Windows XP* and Microsoft Vista* are no longer supported with new versions of Intel® GPA. Our customers have indicated that their primary development platform is now Microsoft Windows 7*, and that little or no optimization occurs on Microsoft Windows XP* or Vista*.

The latest version of Intel® GPA will continue to be validated with Microsoft DirectX* 9, 9 EX, 10, 10.1 and 11 on Microsoft Windows 7* and other new OS versions as they are released.

For the latest information about Intel GPA's support of the Microsoft* Windows* 8, see this article.

Where to Next?

We want to be the best tool for your graphics optimization work, and welcome your comments and suggestions in the Intel GPA Support Forum.

For more information on this product, check out the Intel GPA Home Page, the product FAQ, the Knowledge Base of technical articles, and the Help Files installed with the product.

Thanks for using Intel GPA!

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

08-15-2011

04-20-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

In order to focus efforts on newer operating systems and technologies, the Intel GPA toolset no longer supports Microsoft Windows XP*.

Intel® GPA tip: Interpreting API errors when using Intel GPA Frame Analyzer

Tue, 11 May 2010 23:00:00 -0700

Introduction
Saving a frame from your game for later analysis is one of the major features of Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA). When Intel GPA creates this file, it saves the context of all Microsoft DirectX* API calls that were used to create the frame.

However, in some situations Intel GPA Frame Analyzer may report DX API errors in the capture file, even though no errors were reported when running your game or when capturing the file. The rest of this article explains why you may see these errors, and how to check whether these are an issue that may affect your analysis and optimization task.

Situation #1 -- Playback errors occur when creation and playback graphics devices are different
Another situation where you might see errors within Intel GPA Frame Analyzer occurs when you attempt to load a frame capture file on a graphics device that is different from the graphics device you used to create the capture file. Even though Intel GPA will print a warning message for this situation, the tool does allow you to continue -- but you're responsible for ensuring that this works OK.

In this situation the errors that occur within Intel GPA Frame Analyzer may be significant, and keep you from successfully analyzing this frame. As you might expect, issues will most likely occur when the original graphics device has far more capabilities than the device you are using for playback -- such as a high-end, discrete graphics card and a low-end netbook. Therefore, making DX calls that attempt to use resources and features that don't exist will have unpredictable results, and this is not something that Intel GPA can fix for you.

So a good "rule of thumb" when using a single frame capture file on multiple devices:

capture the frame on the least capable device, since the more capable devices will likely provide all the capabilities of the original device (and therefore have no issues)
don't use a frame capture file created on one vendor's system with another vendor's system (since it's more likely that they'll have various features that don't quite match across architectures)

Situation #2 -- Playback errors are expected and can be ignored
As mentioned above, all DirectX calls are saved to the capture file. But the original game code may make DX calls that it expects may generate errors, and since they are expected the game doesn't report these errors back to the user. When you then load that capture file into Intel GPA Frame Analyzer, Intel GPA may report an error message that one or more API errors were found (even though none were reported when running the game), and ask whether you want to continue loading the file.

The Intel GPA development team has seen this in a couple of cases already -- one game attempts to use a proprietary texture format, and if that texture map creation call fails it then creates that texture map using a more portable texture format. In another situation a developer wants to see whether a particular graphic resource exists -- to do this they check the return code from a DX API call that attempts to use that resource.

So in both of these cases the user doesn't see any errors, but the original API call appears in the frame capture file. In both cases when loading the file you'll see an error in Intel GPA Frame Analyzer -- to verify that all is in fact OK, select one or more ergs within the GUI, then open the "API Log" tab to examine the API calls, where Intel GPA will highlight any errors in red. If all items highlighted in red are expected, just ignore them.

Conclusion
This article has described a couple of situations where you may see errors when loading and/or playing back frame capture files within Intel GPA Frame Analyzer. We've attempted to help you understand the nature of these errors, and whether you can ignore these errors during your analysis.

If you still have questions after reading this article, please use the Intel GPA Support Forum to ask a question or describe an issue you are having with the product.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

08-15-2011

01-20-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

When Intel® GPA creates frame capture files, all DX calls your game makes are included in the file, including calls that return errors. This article describes the tool's handling of API errors, and what you need to do when Intel GPA reports them.

Intel® GPA tip: using simple pixel shader

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:00:00 -0700

Introduction
Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) includes a number of override modes in both the Intel GPA System Analyzer HUD and the Intel GPA Frame Analyzer. These override modes and experiments are fairly easy to understand and use (especially if you've got the Intel GPA Help File as a reference!),

But some users have found that using "Simple Pixel Shader" produces unexpected results -- using the "simple" shader actually takes longer to render than the original shaders!

The rest of this article describes why you might see unusual results, and how to "look under the hood" to detect when this is happening.

Wait a Minute... what's going on here?
Here's the setup: a game developer wants to analyze her game on a low-cost netbook system that includes a low-end graphics chipset. She runs Intel GPA System Analyzer to create a frame capture file for later analysis.

Within Intel GPA Frame Analyzer, she wants to see whether the shaders are taking up too much rendering time, so she uses the "Simple Pixel Shader" option in the experiments tab. But what Intel GPA reports is an increase in rendering time with "Simple Pixel Shader", rather than the expected decrease!

Let’s Look Under the Hood…
The Intel GPA developer team examined the user's frame capture file, and found out that the game was using DX9 mode -- on this configuration the game does not generate any pixel or vertex shaders, but instead uses the DirectX fixed function pipeline. The team verified this by loading the frame capture file into Intel GPA Frame Analyzer, and within the "shaders" tab found that no vertex or pixel shaders are present (all values are "0").

But to implement "Simple Pixel Shaders", Intel GPA substitutes a "simple" pixel shader for rendering the frame that uses the programmable pipeline, independent of how the original frame was rendered (which in this case the system used the fixed function pipeline). Also, as one might expect, on this low-end platform the programmable pipleline always renders more slowly than the fixed function pipeline.

Conclusion
If you have no vertex or pixel shaders, do not use the "Simple Pixel Shaders" experiment, as you may find that Intel GPA reports slower rendering times that you might expect. If you see unexpected results when using this experiment, check to see whether any shaders are defined by using the "shaders" tab within Intel GPA Frame Analyzer.

Extra Credit...
By the way, note that some devices will emulate various fixed viewing pipeline operations with internal operations, so that Intel GPA shows time being spent performing operations that on the surface look wrong. For example, using "clear" may show the Pixel Shader time is non-zero.

Neal Pierman

04-21-2010

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

Performance Analysis

Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) includes a number of override modes in both the Intel GPA System Analyzer HUD and the Intel GPA Frame Analyzer. Some users have found that using "Simple Pixel Shader" override sometimes actually takes longer to render the frame than the original shaders! This article describes why you might see unusual results, and how to "look under the hood" to detect when this is happening.

Intel® GPA Troubleshooting Tip: Disable anti-virus or firewall software

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:00:00 -0800

Problem:
Though you've installed Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) without errors, you may encounter one or more of the following symptoms after starting the Intel GPA tools:

the game never starts on the target system, or crashes when using Intel GPA
the Intel GPA applications or the game you are analyzing become non-responsive
you receive an error from the Intel GPA Monitor indicating that it cannot attach to the game or graphics application

Root Cause:
Intel GPA creates a socket network connection between the target and client systems which is used for sending commands and data between the two system. This connection is required even if the target and client are co-located on the same physical hardware. But on some systems security software products may block or interfere with the communication between the target and client, so that one or more of the Intel GPA applications may be unable to connect with the Intel GPA Monitor, or the Intel GPA applications become non-responsive.

Resolution:
First, disable any anti-virus and/or firewall software that may be running on either the client or target systems, reboot your computer, then restart the Intel GPA applications.

Note that we have reports from customers that the following products may interfere with the operation of Intel GPA: McAfee VirusScan Enterprise*. Also, it is possible that similar products from other vendors will also interfere with Intel GPA, so please let us know about these other tools at the Intel GPA Support Forums.

Finally, remember that disabling anti-virus or firewall software may leave you open to security attacks, so take other precautions to ensure the security of your systems.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

08-15-2011

01-20-2012

Tech Articles

Intel® GPA

Anti-virus or firewall software can interfere with the operation of Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA). This article describes the issue and ways to workaround the problem.