NVIDIA Nsight Systems Adds Vulkan 1.3 Support

Understanding NVIDIA Nsight Systems and Its Support for Vulkan

Summary: NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a powerful tool designed to help developers analyze and optimize the performance of their applications across CPUs and GPUs. This article delves into how Nsight Systems supports Vulkan, a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. We explore the key features and benefits of using Nsight Systems for profiling Vulkan applications, highlighting its ability to capture detailed information about Vulkan API function execution times, GPU workloads, and frame durations.

Introduction to NVIDIA Nsight Systems

NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a performance analysis tool that provides developers with a unified timeline view of how their applications use computer resources. This tool helps identify performance issues such as GPU starvation, unnecessary CPU and GPU synchronizations, insufficient CPU parallelization or pipelining, and unexpectedly expensive CPU or GPU algorithms. Nsight Systems employs low-overhead tracing and sampling techniques to collect process and thread activity, correlating profiling data across CPU cores and GPU queues.

Key Features of Nsight Systems

• Unified Timeline View: Nsight Systems displays data in a single timeline, combining CPU and GPU activities. This timeline includes multiple rows that show different data, such as CPU usage, thread activities, command buffer creation, swap chains, and queue operations.
• CPU and Thread Analysis: CPU rows display how threads utilize each CPU core, helping locate idle times. Thread rows provide a detailed view of each thread’s activities, including CPU core load, blocked states, call-stacks, and Vulkan API calls.
• Vulkan Support: Nsight Systems supports Vulkan, capturing information about Vulkan API function execution times, corresponding GPU workloads, debug util labels, and frame durations. This support is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.

Profiling Vulkan Applications with Nsight Systems

Nsight Systems is particularly useful for developers working with Vulkan. The tool can capture detailed information about Vulkan API calls, GPU workloads, and frame durations, providing insights into how Vulkan applications perform.

Capturing Vulkan API Calls

Nsight Systems can capture information about Vulkan API function execution times, which helps developers understand how their code interacts with the GPU. This includes details about command buffer creation, swap chains, and queue operations.

Analyzing GPU Workloads

The tool provides a detailed view of GPU workloads, showing how they correlate with CPU activities. This helps developers identify bottlenecks and optimize their applications for better performance.

Debugging with Vulkan Debug Utils Labels

Nsight Systems supports Vulkan debug utils labels, which can be used to annotate the timeline with application logic. This feature improves the readability of the timeline, making it easier to understand how the application behaves.

Benefits of Using Nsight Systems for Vulkan

Using Nsight Systems for profiling Vulkan applications offers several benefits:

• Improved Performance: By identifying bottlenecks and optimizing GPU workloads, developers can achieve better performance in their Vulkan applications.
• Detailed Insights: Nsight Systems provides detailed information about Vulkan API calls, GPU workloads, and frame durations, giving developers a comprehensive understanding of their application’s performance.
• Cross-Platform Support: Nsight Systems supports both Windows and Linux operating systems, making it a versatile tool for developers working on different platforms.

Table: Key Features of Nsight Systems for Vulkan

Table: Benefits of Using Nsight Systems for Vulkan

Conclusion

NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a powerful tool for analyzing and optimizing the performance of Vulkan applications. Its support for Vulkan provides developers with detailed insights into how their applications interact with the GPU, helping them identify bottlenecks and optimize performance. By leveraging Nsight Systems, developers can create more efficient and high-performing Vulkan applications.