Hi there,

I've been using Intel GPA for at least a year now. Am partially happy with it, thus is this topic with some suggestions.

1. GPA should be able to run two instances - it would be tremendously more easy to compare/diff stuff, for example tracking a bug

2. Shown state problems (my main problem actually)

2.1. Texture vs sampler ordering. Which texture is bound to which sampler? Very confusing!

2.2. Texture alpha, render target alpha, native depth. Even better a toggleable mask with the RGBA channels

2.3. Shader constants - show current constants in a given, user specified range, not only the ones set between this and the previous arg! Most engines do cache stuff and showing the immediate setup before the Arg is actually not so usefull, since shader use a lot more constants. Specifying the range can help to concentrate on some specific parameter of the shader

3. Experiments:

3.1. Use 2x2 textures for everything *except* the ones used as Render targets - or else deferred renderers just can't use that in a sensible way 3.2. Change resolution - quite often the resolution is very easy to spot and to reallocate all Render targets that match it to some other dimensions. Yep, shader constants that use resolution could get it wrong, but most of the time they don't matter for the performance 3.3. Limit DIP primitive count to some max value

Some small gripes I have, but hour after hour they get really in the way:

4. Select Arg update is not quite fast and very often I just uncheck curent Arg and check another one. Bam, two updates of the UI + render targets... Can you make something like 'Select only that Arg'?

5. Changing Args should try to keep the current selected Render target if any. Often they are the thing people inspect and constantly selecting then instead of the Back buffer is... well.

6. Easy stepping forward and back one Arg at a time would be great + highlighting the changed stuff vs non-changed

7. API log is good, but it would be better if we can filter the stuff there. Groups like 'Render target', 'Viewport', 'shader const setup', etc. to exclude the stuf we don't need and to be able to observe some specific behavior in the whole frame log.

8. API log objects - would be great if we could see the render targets / shaders without going to the exact Arg, so the browing of the large logs would be really handy

Thanks!