[osg-users] [Phoronix] AMD Pushes gDEBugger Away From Linux, Mac OS X

[Chris 'Xenon' Hanson]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item

This is a shame.

--
Chris 'Xenon' Hanson, omo sanza lettere. Xe...@AlphaPixel.com http://www.alphapixel.com/
Digital Imaging. OpenGL. Scene Graphs. GIS. GPS. Training. Consulting. Contracting.
"There is no Truth. There is only Perception. To Perceive is to Exist." - Xen
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[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hi Chris,

> This is a shame.

Definitely. In addition to dropping Linux and MacOS X support, they
changed it to a Visual Studio plugin which currently ONLY works in VS 2010!

I don't even want to ask whether they will still support the low-level
counters in nvidia instrumented drivers...

It's not just a shame, it downright sucks. The one tool that could come
even remotely close to competing with MS PIX or nvidia PerfHUD (which
are Direct3D only) for OpenGL just went down the drain...

J-S
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Jean-Sebastien Guay jean-seba...@cm-labs.com
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[Riccardo Corsi]

Hi guys,

I agree it's really a shame for gDebugger...

there's another GL api tracer that might be worth to take a look at:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2011/04/apitrace.html

I've never tried it, but it seems very powerfufl.
hth,
ricky

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 22:13, Jean-Sébastien Guay <jean-seba...@cm-labs.com> wrote:

Hi Chris,

  This is a shame.

Definitely. In addition to dropping Linux and MacOS X support, they changed it to a Visual Studio plugin which currently ONLY works in VS 2010!

I don't even want to ask whether they will still support the low-level counters in nvidia instrumented drivers...

It's not just a shame, it downright sucks. The one tool that could come even remotely close to competing with MS PIX or nvidia PerfHUD (which are Direct3D only) for OpenGL just went down the drain...

J-S

--
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[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hi Ricky,

> there's another GL api tracer that might be worth to take a look at:
> http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2011/04/apitrace.html
>
> I've never tried it, but it seems very powerfufl.

I've just spend about an hour getting it compiled (you also have to
compile QJson from source, on which it depends).

It works, but it's a far cry from what gDEBugger was.

First of all, it's a wrapper for opengl32.dll, so it will trace
everything from the start of your app until you quit. There may be some
API you can use to start/stop tracing within your own app, but if not,
then it's all or nothing.

That, combined with the fact that it's extremely slow (it slowed my app
to about 2-3 seconds per frame when it normally runs at 60hz, and that's
for a very small scene) makes it pretty inconvenient to use.

Once you have the trace file, the qapitrace app lets you inspect the
trace, and that's pretty well done. It shows the whole GL command stream
frame-by-frame, and lets you inspect state, textures, shaders (though in
our case, we had 2 fragment shaders and 2 vertex shaders bound in the
same Program, and it only showed one of each), and some info about
vertex buffers / arrays (though one element at a time - it would be more
useful to be able to dump the whole array to inspect it all at once
instead of one vertex at a time).

Essentially, some features are missing and the speed needs to be
improved. An app that could run your application and let you decide when
to start/stop tracing would be nice too. But the basic building blocks
are there and it seems stable, so it's a good start.

It's a shame I don't have the bandwidth to help this project at this
time, because I think there's a gaping void in this area now, and
DirectX has really good tools, so I think it's going to really hurt
OpenGL if the void is not filled soon.

J-S
--
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