Every year at GDC, we like to present some important updates regarding the development tools for game developers that target devices with ARM® Mali™ GPUs. In 2013,we previewed Mali Graphics Debugger v1.0, which was then released a few weeks later. Exactly one year later, at GDC 2014, we showcased v1.3, which included the brand new frame replay feature (see User Guide Section 5.2.10 for details), a new binary format for traces and many performance improvements. In the meantime, we had already implemented advanced features like Frame Capture, Shader Map, Overdraw Map, support for ASTC textures and shader statistics. Version 1.3 has been the most utilized version of that tool, supporting the Khronos APIs OpenGL® ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, as well as EGL and OpenCL™.
Mali Graphics Debugger has been extremely useful to a wide range of developers, from our internal GPU driver teams, to our silicon partners and OEMs, to game engines and games developers, and this is why GDC is such an important event for us.
This year at GDC 2015, we released version 2.1, based on the brand new version 2.0, released right at the end of last year. In the latest version we have made some major improvements to the tool including:
OpenGL ES 3.1 and Android Extension Pack support
Now Mali Graphics Debugger can trace all the functions that are supported in the Mali GPU drivers, and even more, to allow early support for some that are still being developed. This means that all OpenGL ES 3.1 function calls will be present in the trace, and most of the OpenGL ES extensions can be captured seamlessly.
OpenGL ES 3.1 adds support for features like compute shaders, which is a flexible way to manipulate general purpose buffers using the GPU, so that workload can be moved from the application processor to the graphics one. Other features of OpenGL ES 3.1 are indirect draw calls, to allow the GPU to manage the draw calls rather than doing it on the CPU and enhanced texture features like offscreen multisampling. The extensions included in the Android Extension Pack support geometry and tessellation shaders, in addition to the ASTC texture compression format and many other features. OpenGL ES 3.1 and a selection of features of the Android Extension Pack are now supported in Mali Graphics Debugger and in our Mali OpenGL ES emulator.
Support for Android 64-bit
(Or technically, ARMv8-A AARCH64 devices)
Android 5.0 introduces platform support for 64-bit architectures, including ARMv8-A devices. We have ported the Mali Graphics Debugger target components to 64-bit architectures, and we have extensively tested it on our Juno ARM Development Platform (getting started), which is equipped with ARM Cortex®-A57 and Cortex-A53 MPCore™ CPUs for ARMv8-A big.LITTLE™ processing and a Mali™-T624 GPU for 3D graphics acceleration and compute. This has been particularly useful to have to port the Epic Games’ Moon Temple demo to 64-bit. Now it is available to everyone, and we are looking forward to trying it on the brand new Samsung Galaxy S6 phones.
Live editing is becoming even more powerful
Mali Graphics Debugger allows users to edit shaders, override textures and precision while capturing an application. This is done by replaying the same frame, with modified assets, over and over on the target device.
With version 2.1 you can now:
- Change both the fragment and vertex shader of a program and replay the frame to view the results.
- Override textures in an application and replace them with a new texture that will aid in diagnosing any issues with incorrect texture coordinates.
- Override the precision of all elements in a shader and replay the frame to view the results (force highp/mediump/lowp modes).
New Android application provided to support unrooted devices
With the objective of making the installation of the graphics debugger on Android targets easier, we have developed an Android application that runs the required daemon. This eliminates the need to manually install executables on the Android device. The application (APK) works on rooted and unrooted devices.
New features for GPU compute
Mali GPUs don't just render graphics, but they also support general purpose computing, which can be done with compute shaders in OpenGL ES or OpenCL, depending on the use case. In this version, we have a new view for compute shaders, displaying the same shader statistics as the vertex and fragment shaders, which can be very useful for optimizing them and finding bottlenecks.
For OpenCL developers we have also added support for GPUVerify, a tool for formal analysis of GPU kernels written in OpenCL.
GPUVerify was originally designed by Alastair Donaldson (Imperial College London), and has been supported by ARM, among other partners. Read the detailed paper here.
Availability and support
As always, tools provided by ARM are supported in the ARM Connected Community. You can ask a question in the Mali Developer Forums, follow us on Twitter, Sina Weibo, or watch our YouTube, YouKu channels.