3.6.10. PowerVR Tools
The suite of PowerVR Tools is designed to enable rapid graphics application development. It targets a range of areas including asset exporting and optimization, PC emulation, prototyping environments, on-line and off-line performance analysis tools and many more. Please refer to PowerVR-SDK for additional details on the tools and detailed documentation.
There are a number of useful tools available in the Imagination PowerVR SDK that are compatible with our devices. Two of the most useful tools available are PVRTune and PVRCarbon, which can be used for to profiling and tracing GFX activities.
Previously these were included in the target’s rootfs, but these were removed due to tight version dependencies between the target and host tools. Imagination has moved to packaging the target binaries with their host installer, so we recommend using those binaries directly for guaranteed compatibility.
3.6.10.1. PVRTune
The PVRTune utility is a real-time GPU performance analysis tool. It captures hardware timing data and counters which facilitate the identification of performance bottlenecks. PVRPerfServer should be used along with the PVRTune running on the PC to gather data on the SGX loading and activity threads. The target binaries can be found in the host’s PVRTune installation directory under PVRPerfServer.
For more information please refer to Imagination’s upstream documentation on PVRTune and PVRPerfServer.
3.6.10.2. PVRCarbon
The PVRCarbon is an OpenGL® ES and Vulkan ® API recording and analysis utility. PVRCarbon GUI provides off-line tools to inspect captured data, identify redundant calls, highlight costly shaders and many more. This tool can capture traces on target and then play them back on multiple different devices by introducing shim libraries in place of the standard offering for that API.
This requires a little bit of setup on the target though. Please refer to Imagination’s upstream target setup guide for the most recent instructions.