Snapdragon Profiler was featured at the Oculus Rift Developer Conference
In case you missed John Carmack’s much-anticipated closing keynote at the Oculus Rift Developer Conference, you can view it here. In this video, Carmack, who is the CTO of Oculus, refers to Snapdragon Profiler on three separate occasions. In this segment, Carmack states that Snapdragon Profiler is really valuable. He goes on to talk about the important things you can do with Snapdragon Profiler including capturing a snapshot of a single frame so you can inspect every draw call and see its bandwidth. You can also evaluate the textures and shaders, which he says is really valuable. He also mentions Snapdragon Profiler’s Trace Capture mode, which like Systrace captures a wide range of CPU counters, but it also goes beyond that to show exactly what the GPU is doing. He went on to describe how this feature can be used to show the difference between a well-designed application and one that is doing things that are unnecessary and should be fixed. At another point in the video Carmack said “When I see an app that is taking 10, 20, 30 seconds to startup, I can load up my Snapdragon Profiler and see all of the textures…” Later in the presentation Carmack describes how Snapdragon Profiler showed that variable ASTC graphics were used on an app he was profiling. He went on to discuss how he used Snapdragon Profiler to look for color gradient issues or blocking artifacts on graphics and resolved these issues by increasing the bits per pixel of those graphics.
Qualcomm’s own Kevin Hawkins also presented at this year’s Oculus Rift developer conference. His session was called “Profiling VR Games and Applications for Optimum Performance.”
Here is the synopsis from Kevin’s session:
Maximizing the gaming experience on a VR headset requires more than innovative technology and gameplay. It's equally affected by a game’s ability to manage power consumption and avoid device heat ups. These factors can impact a game’s success by limiting performance and making it unplayable on mobile. Learn how to improve power and thermal efficiency while achieving maximum performance for your VR game or app. Analyze and optimize your VR games and applications by exposing detailed CPU, GPU, and system data to reveal your game’s power and performance characteristics. Understand the potential impact of other apps and background processes for a complete picture of system performance.