APITrace Continues Bettering OpenGL Debugging

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 12 October 2013 at 03:35 PM EDT. Add A Comment
MESA
APITrace has been around for a few years and has evolved into the best open-source application for OpenGL debugging and tracing/replaying of OpenGL events. APITrace also supports OpenGL ES and Direct3D/DirectDraw while new features continue to be added.

APITrace makes it easy to record and re-trace various graphics API command streams, inspect states upon any call, view frame-buffers and textures, view the call data, further manipulate the data, profile the performance, and carry out various other tasks. APITrace has been covered several times on Phoronix so if this is your first time hearing about it see our earlier articles and visit apitrace.github.io.

While APITrace has made many improvements and is arguably the best open-source OpenGL tracer/debugger, there's still more work to be done to bring it up to the proprietary competition and what's offered on Windows. As covered last month on Phoronix, Linux still needs better OpenGL debugging support.

The purpose of today's article is to give APITrace another shout-out and to note some recent additions. Committed now is support for grouping of OpenGL calls for grouping of related GL calls. Some other work includes better tracing of GLX context attributes, expanded support for dumping of object labels, additional support in trace for GL_KHR_debug/GL_ARB_debug_output, Direct3D retracing improvements, a new surface viewer for the GUI, and much more. APITrace continues to see new commits almost daily.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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