Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API, targeting a wide variety of devices from PCs to mobile phones and embedded platforms. The Vulkan API is defined by the Khronos Group. Information about Vulkan and the Khronos Group can be found at the Khronos Vulkan Site.
Nsight Systems can capture information about Vulkan usage by the profiled process. This includes capturing the execution time of Vulkan API functions, corresponding GPU workloads, debug util labels, and frame durations. Vulkan profiling is supported on both Windows and x86 Linux operating systems.
The Command Buffer Creation row displays time periods when command buffers were
being created. This enables developers to improve their application’s multi-threaded
command buffer creation. Command buffer creation time period is measured between the
call to vkBeginCommandBuffer
and the call to vkEndCommandBuffer
.
The Swap Chains row displays the available swap chains and the time periods where
vkQueuePresentKHR
was executed on each swap chain.
A Queue row is displayed for each Vulkan queue created by the profiled application.
The API sub-row displays time periods where vkQueueSubmit
was called.
The GPU Workload sub-row displays time periods where workloads were
executed by the GPU.
In addition, you can see Vulkan debug util labels on both the CPU and the GPU.
Clicking on a GPU workload highlights the corresponding vkQueueSubmit
call, and vice versa.
When tracing target application calls to Vulkan pipeline creation APIs, Nsight Systems leverages the Pipeline Creation Feedback extension to collect more details about the duration of individual pipeline creation stages.
See Pipeline Creation Feedback extension for details about this extension.
Vulkan pipeline creation feedback is available on NVIDIA driver release 435 or later.
Vulkan GPU trace is available only when tracing apps that use NVIDIA GPUs.
The endings of Vulkan Command Buffers execution ranges on Compute and Transfer queues may appear earlier on the timeline than their actual occurrence.
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