Developers of 3D applications understand the importance of convenient tools to analyze frames and rendering performance. Modern 3D applications are extremely complex, and their complexity only grows in time. To use features of various GPUs in the optimal way, programmers need utilities to help them find bugs and bottlenecks in their applications.

A GPU and a CPU perform many different graphics pipeline operations for each frame, and overall performance depends on the slowest segment. That's why convenient debuggers are so important -- it's very difficult to analyze hundreds of calls each millisecond without proper tools.

Utilities for 3D development existed before, of course. For example, Microsoft PIX for Windows from DirectX SDK. Or NVIDIA NVPerfKit or ATI/AMD GPU PerfStudio. Microsoft is interested in PIX not only because of DirectX, but also because of Xbox. And AMD with NVIDIA manufacture GPUs. But there are other manufacturers of graphics solutions, leading ones at that. So, today we are going to review Intel Graphics Performance Analyzer 2.0, which has been announced at GDC 2009.

Intel Graphics Performance Analyzer (GPA) 2.0 is a bundle of utilities for 3D developers, which contains powerful tools to analyze performance of Direct3D applications, to detect bottlenecks, and to optimize them. These utilities have a traditional interface for such tools, it resembles Microsoft PIX for Windows or ATI/AMD utilities than tools from NVIDIA, which we already reviewed on our web site.

Read the entire article at iXBT Labs.