July 28th, 2018 — Imagination Technologies announced a new version of PVRTune, the PowerVR GPU performance analysis tool which provides developers with a deep level of information to help them fully understand the dynamics of their applications on mobile and embedded devices. With the new capabilities in PVRTune 2018 Release 1, developers can create apps and games that take full advantage of the underlying hardware to achieve optimal performance at the lowest possible power consumption.
Developers use PVRTune to analyze the performance of their applications running on PowerVR GPUs in real-time and use the fine-grain performance information to easily identify bottlenecks. With this release, PVRTune is now ?API aware,? able to retrieve and present events that have been generated by the client driver of native programming interfaces such as OpenGL? ES and the EGL?. In addition, UI enhancements make navigation more intuitive than ever and also improve the clarity of data presentation.
Mark Butler, VP, PowerVR software graphics engineering, Imagination Technologies, says: ?PVRTune represents the first time a mobile GPU vendor is exposing so much in-depth driver and hardware information. Across all of our PowerVR developer tools, we are providing as much information as possible and presenting it in a way that is easy to understand. PowerVR GPUs are designed to deliver stunning visual experiences on the most power-conscious products. Developers creating games and apps for devices with a PowerVR GPU can use PVRTune to take full advantage of this leading graphics architecture.?
PVRTune lets developers view application-level API calls (e.g. glDraw) in the PVRTune GUI and trace a piece of work from the application level through the PowerVR driver and onto the hardware for execution. In this way they can see how work that was submitted at the application level directly affects the behavior and performance of both the driver and hardware. PVRTune can also provide other information from the client driver such as surface format, size and shader details. PVRTune today supports OpenGL ES / EGL client driver, with Vulkan? support to follow.
PVRTune comprises two applications?the PVRTune GUI which runs on the developer machine to collect and visualize counter data, and PVRPerfServer, a lightweight application that runs on the target device and collects statistics for the individual modules within PowerVR GPUs. With PVRTune, developers can check the performance of their applications while they are running, or they can save and store data for later analysis. The PVRTune GUI and PVRPerfServer work alongside PVRHub and PVRScope to provide comprehensive performance analysis.
Tags: GPU, Imagination Technologies, PowerVR, PVRTune