Get Started with Intel® Graphics

Performance Analyzers
Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

Contents
Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel®
GPA) ..3
System Analysis: Analyze Your Game Performance in Real Time ...................... 4
Trace Analysis: Analyze Application Execution on the CPU and GPU .................. 6
Frame Analysis: Analyze Frames for Performance Bottlenecks ......................... 8
Learn More ............................................................................................. 11
Notices and Disclaimers............................................................................ 12

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)

Get Started with Intel® Graphics

Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)
Test: Use this documentation to get started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA), which is
a toolset for graphics performance analysis and optimization of games and other graphics-intensive
applications. Intel® GPA is available on Windows* and Ubuntu* hosts.
For Chinese version of this document, refer to Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers -
Simplified Chinese.

Download Intel GPA

To download Intel GPA, visit the download page. For installation instructions, refer to Install and Launch
Intel® GPA.

Supported Graphics APIs

API Windows Host Ubuntu Host

Microsoft DirectX* yes N/A

Vulkan* yes no

OpenGL* yes* yes

OpenCL™ yes* no

Intel® Media SDK yes* no

Intel® oneAPI Video Processing yes* no

Library (oneVPL)

*on Windows OS, OpenGL, OpenCL, Intel® Media SDK, and oneVPL support is limited to Trace mode.
For details on software and hardware requirements for Intel® GPA, see the product Release Notes.

Understand the Workflow

Intel GPA includes four tools:
• Use Graphics Monitor as a starting point: navigate to your application, configure options, capture frame,
stream, and trace files, launch real-time analysis.
• With System Analyzer, analyze CPU, GPU, and graphics API metrics in real time.
• With Graphics Trace Analyzer, analyze graphics application execution on the CPU and GPU.
• With Graphics Frame Analyzer, analyze streams and frames, including API calls and graphics resources.
To get started with Intel GPA, you can deep dive into the tool you are interested in, or follow the general
workflow:

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

System Analysis: Analyze Your Game Performance in Real

Time
Use Intel® GPA System Analyzer to view CPU, GPU, and graphics API metrics in real time to determine
problem scenes of the application.
Problem scenes are when the game is slow to render specific objects, textures, new locations. Imbalanced
CPU and GPU workload also indicates performance issues. For example, do not have the GPU running at
100% while the CPU is only 20% utilized, and vice versa.
To start system analysis:
1.
Run Graphics Monitor by double-clicking the Graphics Monitor icon in the taskbar notification area
or on the desktop.
2.
Specify the application for analysis by clicking the Browse button on the lower right and browsing

to your application ( ).
On Windows, you can use a sample application gpasample.exe.
3.
Run the application by clicking the Start button ( ).
The analyzed application launches in a separate window with heads-up-display (HUD) overlay on the
top left. HUD shows system information and frame rate, with the lowest value shown in red and the
highest shown in green.

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)

4.
Return to the Graphics Monitor and click the Connect System Analyzer button next to your

application ( ).
System Analyzer opens and attaches to your application.

5. Identify the problematic area for further detailed analysis using real-time metrics. For example, detect
scenes, where:
• Frame rendering takes too long: analyze the Frame Time metric.
• CPU and GPU workload is imbalanced: evaluate CPU and GPU load by analyzing GPU Busy and
Target App CPU Load metrics.

6. Once step 5 is done, close System Analyzer window.

As a result, you can find an area that potentially has performance issues. If you haven't found a particular
problem scene with System Analyzer, proceed with trace analysis or frame analysis to identify areas for
performance improvements.

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

Next Steps
Identify whether your game is GPU- or CPU-bound in the determined scene, with Graphics Trace Analyzer.

Trace Analysis: Analyze Application Execution on the CPU

and GPU
Use Intel® GPA Graphics Trace Analyzer to:
• Evaluate CPU and GPU workload to identify whether the bottleneck on the CPU or GPU side.
• Identify problem areas in graphics application execution: analyze calls to graphics APIs, review user-
defined debug markers, threads, queued GPU commands.
• Perform a high-level analysis of synchronization and parallelism efficiency.
To start trace analysis:
1.
Run Graphics Monitor by double-clicking the Graphics Monitor icon in the taskbar notification area
or on the desktop.
2.
Specify the application for analysis by clicking the Browse button on the lower right and browsing

to your application ( ).
On Windows, you can use the sample application gpasample.exe.
3.
Select the Trace startup mode from the drop-down menu on the lower right ( ).
4.
Run the application by clicking the Start button ( ).
The application launches in a separate window.
5.
Capture a trace by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T in the window with the target app running ( ).
When the capture is complete, a message with the file name displays.

NOTE Hotkeys may interfere with game keyboard usage. In this case, you can customize shortcuts.

6.
Open the trace by double-clicking its thumbnail in the right pane of the Graphics Monitor window ( ).

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)

Platform View of Trace Analyzer opens.

7. Perform a high-level analysis to identify whether the bottleneck is on the GPU side.
You can identify a GPU-bound game by the following criteria:
• All frames are longer than expected. Expected frame duration depends on performance goals. For
example, if your goal is 60 FPS, frame duration should be approximately 16 milliseconds.
The frame duration is measured in milliseconds and shown in curly braces for each frame in the CPU
Frames track.

• The GPU is busy the entire time and the GPU queue (3D track) has no visible gaps.
• The Driver queue (Device Context track) continuously accumulates command buffers waiting for
execution on the GPU.

• CPU threads are inactive most of the time.

The thread activity zone above the CPU thread track contains green or grey intervals. Colors
indicate whether the thread was active or inactive during a particular period.

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

8. Once step 7 is done, close Graphics Trace Analyzer window.

As a result, you can identify whether your application is "bottlenecked" by the GPU. In this case, you need to
analyze the graphics pipeline in detail to find optimization possibilities.

Next Steps
If the game is GPU-bound, analyze the graphics pipeline with Graphics Frame Analyzer.
If the game is not GPU-bound:
• Analyze synchronization and parallelization with Graphics Trace Analyzer:
• To learn more about trace analysis workflow, refer to the user guide section Identify Issues in Graphics
Application Execution with Trace Analyzer.
• To take a closer look at the features of Graphics Trace Analyzer, watch short video series In Depth:
Graphics Trace Analyzer.
• Analyze CPU-bound issues with Intel® VTune™ Profiler.

Frame Analysis: Analyze Frames for Performance

Bottlenecks
Use Intel® GPA Graphics Frame Analyzer to identify bottlenecks in the graphics pipeline. Capture a stream (a
sequence of frames), focus on a particular frame, and explore API calls and graphics resources of this frame.
To start frame analysis:
1.
Run Graphics Monitor by double-clicking the Graphics Monitor icon in the taskbar notification area
or on the desktop.
2.
Specify the application for analysis by clicking the Browse button on the lower right and browsing

to your application ( ).
On Windows, you can use the sample application gpasample.exe.
3.
Select the Stream startup mode from the drop-down menu on the lower right ( ).
4.
Run the application by clicking the Start button ( ).
The application launches in a separate window. By default, stream capture starts immediately when the
application is started.
5.
Complete stream capture by pressing L ( ).
6.
Open the trace using the Open File ribbon of the Graphics Monitor window ( ).

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)

Multiframe View of Frame Analyzer opens.

7. For detailed analysis, open a frame that appears to perform poorly. For example, identify the longest
frame by analyzing the GPU Time Elapsed metric, which shows the amount of time spent on frame
rendering:
a.
On the GPU Time Elapsed track, click the longest frame ( ).
b.
Click the Open button on the lower left ( ).

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

Profiling View window of Frame Analyzer opens.

8. Start analysis with the Advanced Profiling Mode, which allows you to identify potential bottlenecks.

Click the Advanced Profiling Mode button on the top left.

The API calls are grouped by bottlenecks on the Visualization ( ) and API Log ( ) panes. The
first group of draw calls is the most impactful and time-consuming.

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA)

9. Start resolving issues with the most impactful bottleneck. Click the first group of draw calls either in the
Visualization or API Log pane.
The resources associated with this group of calls appear in the Resources pane. The Bottlenecks tab
presents the graphics pipeline color-coded by bottleneck distribution. Red portions of the pipeline
indicate main bottlenecks, and orange indicate secondary bottlenecks.

10. In the Bottlenecks tab, click the red bottleneck, for example, Local/Host Memory: Graphics-to-
Memory Interface. The bottleneck cause, hints, and related metrics appear.

11. Once step 10 is done, close Graphics Frame Analyzer window.

As a result, you can identify potential bottlenecks of your application and get hints on how to resolve issues.

Next Steps
To take a closer look at the features of Graphics Frame Analyzer, including working with single and multiple
frames, watch short video series In Depth: Graphics Frame Analyzer.
To learn more about frame analysis workflow, refer to the user guide section Analyze GPU-bound Applications
with Graphics Frame Analyzer.
To learn about bottlenecks identified by Graphics Frame Analyzer, refer to the cookbook topic Performance
Optimization for Intel® Processor Graphics.

Learn More
To learn more about the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA), see the following resources:

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 Get Started with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

Resource Description

Intel GPA Get Started Guide Get the Simplified Chinese version of this document.
(Simplified Chinese)

Optimization Cookbook Explore the mechanics of graphics optimization and learn best practices.

Intel GPA User Guide Get full information on the product features and usage flows.

Online Training Get access to Intel® GPA videos and tutorials.

Release Notes Learn about Intel® GPA new features and supported system
configurations.

Documentation Library View documentation for all the Intel® GPA features.

Support Forum Ask your questions about Intel® GPA and get help and support.

Intel® Game Dev Boost
program
Intel GPA Framework
Benefit from Intel marketing program that supports developers
providing game applications on Intel architecture. Selected applications
will be promoted by Intel in social channels. The value of this benefit is
estimated at $5,000 per title. Additionally, your game will be considered
for other Intell® Game Dev Boost activities like email campaigns, event
demonstrations, and game bundles.
Learn about Intel® GPA Framework - a cross-platform, cross-API suite of
tools and interfaces, which allows you to capture, playback and analyze
graphics applications.

Notices and Disclaimers

Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.
No product or component can be absolutely secure.
Your costs and results may vary.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its
subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
No license (express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise) to any intellectual property rights is granted by this
document.

The products described may contain design defects or errors known as errata which may cause the product
to deviate from published specifications. Current characterized errata are available on request.

Intel disclaims all express and implied warranties, including without limitation, the implied warranties of
merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, as well as any warranty arising from
course of performance, course of dealing, or usage in trade.

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