You can use the Frame Profiler in Android Performance Analyzer to analyze your app's GPU performance when rendering a single, specific frame.
What is a frame profiler?
A frame profiler is a tool for measuring time spent and other performance metrics for each render pass that goes into a single frame. Where a system profiler focuses on an app's impact on the entire system over a given period of time, a frame profiler is concerned with just one frame.
A frame profiler is also distinct from a frame debugger, which extracts information about all of the constituent parts of a frame and how it was rendered, providing a microscopic view of the rendering process. For frame debugging, you can export results from the Frame Profiler to RenderDoc.
Profiling process
When you capture a frame profile, the Frame Profiler in Android Performance Analyzer records the sequence of API calls, the parameters passed, and relevant GPU memory contents in a GFXR file. This lets the Frame Profiler accurately repeat the frame as many times as necessary to complete the profiling tasks and collect data for the frame profile.
Before measuring frame and render pass duration, the tool runs a compute shader workload to force the GPU to maximum frequency. This establishes a stable baseline for comparison, ensuring that transient frequency variations don't skew the data across multiple frame profiles.
To ensure greater accuracy and consistency, the Frame Profiler loops the frame up to 100 times and averages the results, filtering out any samples that are contaminated by another app's GPU activity.
User guides
To learn more about the Frame Profiler in Android Performance Analyzer, see the following guides:
- Quickstart. Get started with running and viewing frame profiles right away if you're already familiar with GPU profiling.
- Verify compatibility. Learn how to get the most reliable results for your test device, game engine, and graphics API.
- Capture a frame profile. Learn how to configure and run a frame profile.
- View a frame profile. Learn about the data included in a frame profile and how to navigate it.
- Export and analyze results. Learn how to export your frame profiles to RenderDoc for further analysis.