OpenGL Insights

A Real-Time Profiling Tool

Lionel Fuentes

35.1 Introduction

As time goes on, video games are becoming more complex, presenting rich environ-

ments, a high level of interaction with the player, gorgeous graphics, physics sim-

ulation, etc. To push the hardware to its limits, developers need to have a precise

knowledge of the time taken by the executed tasks, their distribution on the avail-

able hardware threads, and the dependencies each task has on the completion of

the others. To this end, we focus in this chapter on the use of the time counters

present on CPUs and modern GPUs to provide a real-time and easy-to-use profiler

that is directly embedded