Starting from version 2013 R4, Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel GPA) introduce a new version of the Intel GPA Platform Analyzer. If you used the previous version of Intel® GPA Platform Analyzer, your transition to using the new version of the tool should be very straightforward. However, note the following differences:
- Tracing enabled by default: You do not need to select this option from the Intel GPA Monitor Preferences configuration pane to enable this feature.
- Tracing configuration options minimized:
- To configure tracing, you need to set the Tracing Duration option only, via Intel GPA Monitor> Profiles >Tracing. This option replaces the Trace Buffer Size option.
- The options for collecting DirectX* data, hardware context, and internal data are no longer available since the new version of Intel GPA Platform Analyzer automatically collects the data necessary for creating and viewing all the data charts.
- Android* support: Beside traditional support for the Windows*-based applications, Intel GPA Platform Analyzer now supports Android applications running on platforms with Intel Processor Graphics (root access is required) and PowerVR* Graphics.
- GPU software queue: The Platform View of the new Intel GPA Platform Analyzer provides data on GPU usage per GPU engine and DMA packet domain on a software queue at each moment of time. The Platform View per Packet Type is supported for the data collected with the Collect DMA packet type configuration option enabled and is available for platforms with Intel Processor Graphics. The Packet Type view helps easily identify scheduled OpenCL™ and media related tasks.
- No application startup capturing: The option for capturing the application startup is no longer available. Instead, select a sufficiently large trace duration (such as 5 seconds) and use an Intel GPA trigger (such as Application Time> 3) to approximate this feature. However, the new data collection methods being used in Intel GPA Platform Analyzer cannot capture trace data beginning with the exact start of an application.
- No support for tracing OpenCL™ kernels data: The development team is considering adding this feature in a future release of the product. If you need access to OpenCL application data, see this article for profiling your DirectX* application using Intel VTune™ Amplifier XE.
- No Summary view: Consider using the new Platform View that provides additional features and should provide a sufficient representation of the application execution on GPU and CPU cores. A separate Summary view is available with the VTune™ Amplifier.
Overall, the new Intel GPA Platform Analyzer provides an advanced platform analysis mechanism that can more quickly isolate and identify task synchronization issues across the CPUs and GPU. For details about running the tool on different operating systems and new features incrementally added to each release of the new Intel GPA Platform Analyzer, see Intel GPA Release Notes and Online Help.
If you have any feedback, please post your comments and suggestions on the Intel GPA Support Forum.
For more information about the Intel GPA, see the Intel GPA Home Page or the Intel INDE Home Page.