OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

Profiling Tools

Perhaps the most powerful way to profile your application is to use an external profiling and debugging tool. This type of tool hooks OpenGL on a running system and intercepts the function calls that your application makes. The simplest tools merely take a log of the function calls, perhaps gathering statistics or other information about them. Some of these tools may even allow you to play back the resulting trace and replicate the execution of your application in a standalone environment. More advanced tools allow you to inspect data that flows between the application and OpenGL, to time execution of various elements of the scene and even to modify the application’s behavior as it executes by disabling parts of the OpenGL pipeline, ...