GDC is here again (some details about what we’re doing here and more on the GDC Site). Wow, that was a fast year, it only seems like last month when I was on the booth’s there talking about Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA), running demo’s, oh and doing a presentation on it! Well this year I’m going to be there again talking about GPA. Why?

GPA is growing in popularity amongst developers but we’ve noticed that some of you tend only to use it for last minute triage of games that don’t perform too well on ‘this’ platform or ‘that’ GPU. It’s normally a case of “Man – its slow on the xxx, I suppose we better get GPA out…” Well, we all know that fixing code and models right at the end of a dev is expensive (we’ve all had to do it, right?). The closer to the end you are the more it costs! Well, GPA is a tool that can save you a lot of the last minute miseries by helping you look for potential problem areas early in development. What I’m talking about this year is how to use GPA as a profiling tool early in in the development cycle to help you get at problems when they happen.

Also, I’ve got some info introducing GPA3.0 which is the new revision of the tool suite. There’s new features, new counters, new bits & bobs, a wider range of supported OS’s and a great new tool called ‘Platform View’, which lets you look at CPU / GPU load in whatever context you set up for it. You can use Platform View raw, but it’s best if you instrument your code with the easy to use API that comes with it – that’s when it comes into its own. More on that at the show – don’t want to spoil it by giving too much away.

I’ll be presenting at 10:10am on Monday morning so, if you’re coming along no loud noises please:) Looking forward to seeing you all there.

Steve