Radeon GPU Profiler Should Help Vulkan Game Developers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon GPU Profiler Should Help Vulkan Game Developers

Besides yesterday evening marking the embargo expiration for the new Crimson ReLive / AMDGPU-PRO 17.30 details, AMD also announced the public availability of the Radeon GPU Profiler...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-GPU-Profiler

[KRiloshart]

Congratulations! Does AMD have any rough idea to when will DC ('D'isplay 'C'ode) will be ready. if that sets, AMD will be almost all set on linux.

[ElectricPrism]

I've been running AMD DC the last 2 weeks via AUR linux-amd-staging-git package. It needs to be mainlined soon but it seems pretty stable and great IMO.

[SystemCrasher]

There is the GitHub site with the Windows build while the "source code" so far is just a README file.

Nice trolling of (Linux) devs, yay! Following overall AMD Linux development spirit and strategies it would also make sense to tailor this "open" thing the way it only works on 1-2 latest GPU families, demands proprietary drivers or custom kernel, not to mention exotic HW features only found in upcoming GPU/CPU/chipset generations. Mumbling something old HW is crap, but next gen would fix it now and forever; i++; blah-blah. Utter lack of driver would surely add up. Implementing perf monitoring some generic way in Linux kernel? Like it happened for CPUs? Not a snowball chance in the hell! Let devs to fiddle with totally different tools for Intel, AMD, nvidia, PowerVR, ... so most devs would just show their middle fingers and would only profile on Nvidias. Who wants to learn 4-5 totally different tools, after all?

Oh, and "source" tar.gz contains ... just the very same readme? Superb prank!

I've been running AMD DC the last 2 weeks via AUR linux-amd-staging-git package. It needs to be mainlined soon but it seems pretty stable and great IMO.

You may want to read some beginning of this DC/DAL saga to get idea why it takes so long. It's not like if you just come to Linux devs and throw arbitrary garbage on their heads. Somehow AMD elected to do exactly that for whatever reason, to surprise of everybody, because they should have been very well aware it not going to work. Sure, AMD devs promised to "fix" it. But there was little catch. Proper "fix" is basically to eliminate DC/DAL and implement features in DRM/KMS parts instead. Yet AMD wants to use proprietary driver, same as in windows, so they need "abstraction layer". That's where things appear to be somewhat deadlocked. I still wonder why things like FreeSync expected to be private to AMD only, etc. Seems pretty much in pre-KMS age spirit and we all remember these pre-KMS kernels, which were even incapable to e.g. draw panic message on crash due to utter lack any common denominators to switch mode or draw something. So now this story is going to repeat self with HDMI2? FreeSync? Audio? Uh-oh. Oh, sure, performance profiling should also be vendor specific, too. Nono, tools like perf suck. They work on both Intel, AMD and even ARMs. Isn't it horrible?!

[godlike_panos]

AMD updated their git repo. It mentions now that Radeon GPU profiler supports Linux as well. 17.30 drivers are required.

[agd5f]

Oh, sure, performance profiling should also be vendor specific, too. Nono, tools like perf suck. They work on both Intel, AMD and even ARMs. Isn't it horrible?!

The necessary bits are there, in open source, to write an open source tool if someone wanted to. Writing a Linux specific tool sounds nice and all, but most game and application developers are on windows so they need windows tools. Would it be better to have separate Windows and Linux tools or a common tool for both OSes?

[SystemCrasher]

The necessary bits are there, in open source, to write an open source tool if someone wanted to. Writing a Linux specific tool sounds nice and all, but most game and application developers are on windows so they need windows tools. Would it be better to have separate Windows and Linux tools or a common tool for both OSes?

I do not get point of GitHub repos containing just some dumb readme or why windows binaries qualify as "open". On side note, I guess most miners are using Linux and many mining SW devs are Linux users as well. Maybe because using windows for unsupervised operation is a pain in the rear. But alright, AMD GPU compute under Linux isn't my favorite topic, thanks to ways AMD doing it.

Still, I'm curious: what these "necessary bits" are? Any pointers/examples?