[Mesa-dev] renderdoc-traces: like shader-db for runtime

[Eric Anholt]

Rob Clark <robdclark at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 12:26 PM Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:
>
> (tbh I've not really played w/ renderdoc yet.. I should probably do so..)
>
>>   - Mozilla folks tell me that firefox's WebRender display lists can be
>>     captured in browser and then replayed from the WR repo under
>>     apitrace or rendredoc.
>>
>>   - I tried capturing Mozilla's new Pathfinder (think SVG renderer), but
>>     it wouldn't play the demo under renderdoc.
>>
>>   Do you have some apps that should be represented here?
>>
>> - Add microbenchmarks?  Looks like it would be pretty easy to grab
>>   piglit drawoverhead results, not using renderdoc.  Capturing from
>>   arbitrary apps expands the scope of the repo in a way I'm not sure I'm
>>   excited about (Do we do different configs in those apps?  Then we need
>>   config infrastructure.  Ugh).
>>
>> - I should probably add an estimate of "does this overall improve or
>>   hurt perf?"  Yay doing more stats.
>>
>> - I'd love to drop scipy.  I only need it for stats.t.ppf, but it
>>   prevents me from running run.py directly on my targets.
>
> thoughts about adding amd_perfcntr/etc support?  I guess some of the
> perfcntrs we have perhaps want some post-processing to turn into
> usuable numbers, and plenty of them we don't know much about what they
> are other than the name.  But some of them are easy enough to
> understand (like # of fs ALU cycles, etc), and being able to compare
> that before/after shader optimizations seems useful.

I'm not coming up with a good usecase for that, myself -- shader-db
gives me a reasonable proxy for ALU cycles, and we've got wall time for
a frame from this new tool, so perf counters would let me
measure... maybe something like cycles spent in shader including stalls
(think an optimization like GCM where shader-db analysis is unsuitable)
but avoiding the rest of the noise introduced from CPU side costs and
scheduling of jobs onto the GPU?

Running my current perf analysis overnight feels a lot easier than
trying to add configuration to capture specific GPU perf counters to the
tool.  :)

> Also, it would be nice to have a way to extract "slow frames" somehow
> (maybe out of scope for this tool, but related?).. ie. when framerate
> suddenly drops, those are the frames we probably want to look at more
> closely..

Renderdoc lets you capture a series of frames, so I guess you could do
that and pick out your slow one?
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