Valve Is Collaborating On GPUVis For Tuning Radeon Linux VR Performance

One of the many interesting talks at yesterday's XDC2017 conference was Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais talking about GPUVis.

GPUVis is being used by Valve developers as a tool for visualizing the AMDGPU scheduling with SteamVR on Linux. GPUVis can be built on Windows and Linux and features detailed trace information, event filters, plots, and various visualization metrics. Traces are first captured via the trace-cmd record command and can then be analyzed with Gpuvis.

This "GPU Trace Visualizer" itself is open-source under the MIT license and is being developed primarily by RAD Game Tools. Valve does have a very close relationship with RAD Game Tools and the lead developer on GPUVis is Mike Sartain who formerly worked with Valve and was in the original Linux cabal at the company. It wasn't explicitly mentioned during the talk, but it wouldn't surprise me that Valve is contracting RAD to work on this visualization tool. The license on the code also attributes the copyright to Valve Software.

The brief presentation by Valve on GPUVis is embedded below: (begins about 8 hours, 10 minutes in)

The code for GPUVis is available from GitHub.

You will need to be using AMDGPU on a recent Linux kernel release if desiring all of the functionality (Linux 4.12+). The tool can be used for debugging general GPU scheduling problems too and just not SteamVR/VR use-cases.