• Introduction
  • Setting Up Your Workspace
  • Development Pipeline
  • Product Overview
  • Writing Proposals
  • Coding Standards
  • Planning
  • Profiling Plan
  • Documentation Standard
  • Quality Assurance
  • Build Server
  • Risk Assessment
  • Production Roles
  • The Team
  • Configuration Management
  • Credits
  • Wiki Contributions


    • Renderer

  • Architecture
  • How To Use Fallback
  • Detailed Feature List
  • Research

    • Profiling Plan

    For presentations, community items and keeping our renderer high performance we require to profile our work regularly. Before creating a pull request please compare performance with the master branch.

    Setting up the renderer for profiling

    • Switch to Release mode.
    • Disable the debug layer. (d3d12_settings.hpp)
    • Disable the debug factory. (d3d12_settings.hpp)
    • Make sure the other settings (d3d12_settings.hpp and settings.hpp) are the same across the 2 branches you are comparing.
    • Make sure the settings of rt_global.hlsl match across the branches.
    • When profiling in-engine (which is less accurate) don’t run the application attached to the debugger.

    Scenes

    When meassuring for a presentation you want to pick a scene that is most interesting for the feature you are meassuring.

    However when meassuring for pull requests we want to have a standardized benchmark scene. We will introduce such scene soon. Currently benchmarking Viknell with a camera position of {0, 0, -1.5} will suffice. (The camera position ensures no primary rays are missed)

    Numbers

    Frame time can introduce a large error margin. To reduce this don’t meassure the frame time but meassure the passess your code has affected instead. For example in NSight:

    In the range profiler view you can very easily see that the ray tracing in this case DispatchRays takes 2.35 ms and compositing (the Dispatch call) 0.22 ms.

    Build-in profiler

    The build in editor can be used to look for massive differences in performance and often is good enough for testing a pull request. However it does not suffice for meassurements for presentations. The error margin is far to high.

    Tools

    GPU Profilers

    • Render Doc
    • NVIDIA Nsight
    • Visual Studio Profiler & Debugger

    CPU Profilers

    • VTune
    • Visual Studio Profiler

    Memory Profilers

    • Visual Studio Profiler
    • Valgrind
    • Dr.Memory