Unlocking Peak Performance: NVIDIA Nsight Tools for Ampere GPUs

Summary: NVIDIA Nsight tools are a powerful suite designed to help developers optimize their applications for the latest NVIDIA Ampere GPUs. This article explores how Nsight Systems, Nsight Compute, and Nsight Graphics work together to provide a comprehensive view of application performance, enabling developers to identify and address bottlenecks, and ultimately deliver the best user experience.

Understanding NVIDIA Nsight Tools

NVIDIA Nsight tools are a set of developer tools that enable the building, debugging, and profiling of software utilizing the latest accelerated computing hardware. These tools are crucial for developers aiming to maximize the performance of their applications on NVIDIA Ampere architecture, particularly in real-time ray tracing scenarios.

Nsight Systems: A Holistic View

Nsight Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool that visualizes an application’s algorithms, identifies the largest opportunities to optimize, and tunes to scale efficiently across any quantity or size of CPUs and GPUs. It provides a unified timeline of system workload metrics, allowing developers to investigate correlations, dependencies, activity, bottlenecks, and resource allocation to ensure hardware components are working harmoniously.

  • Key Features:
    • Visualize CPU-GPU Interactions: Exposes GPU and CPU activity, events, annotations, throughput, and performance metrics in a chronological timeline.
    • Track GPU Activity: Plots low-level input/output (IO) activity such as PCIe throughput, NVIDIA NVLink, and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) activity.
    • Trace GPU Workloads: Supports investigating the CUDA API and tracing CUDA libraries, including cuBLAS, cuDNN, and NVIDIA TensorRT.

Nsight Compute: Deep Dive into CUDA

Nsight Compute is an interactive kernel profiler for CUDA applications. It provides detailed performance metrics and API debugging via a user interface and command-line tool. This tool is essential for developers who need to optimize compute kernels.

  • Key Features:
    • Detailed Performance Metrics: Offers customizable, data-driven user interface and metric collection.
    • API Debugging: Extends analysis with scripts for post-processing results.
    • Kernel Profiling: Tracks CUDA APIs and kernel calls, collecting performance data for calls of interest.

Nsight Graphics: In-Depth Graphics Analysis

Nsight Graphics is a standalone developer tool with ray-tracing support that enables debugging, profiling, and exporting frames built with Direct3D, Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenVR, and the Oculus SDK.

  • Key Features:
    • Ray Tracing Support: Optimizes performance of applications based on Direct3D 11, Direct3D 12, DirectX Raytracing 1.1, OpenGL, Vulkan, and the Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Extension.
    • Frame Debugging: Allows for the capture and debug of frames to inspect API events and find hard-to-spot bugs.
    • Shader Profiling: Uses PC sampling-based shader profiler to understand how shader instructions are scheduled on GPU warps.

Real-World Applications

Developers at Adobe, Microsoft Azure HPC+AI, and Tracxpoint have leveraged NVIDIA Nsight tools to achieve significant performance improvements in their applications.

  • Adobe: Utilized Nsight Graphics and Nsight Systems to understand and improve the performance of Vulkan ray-tracing applications.
  • Microsoft Azure HPC+AI: Used Nsight Systems to perform detailed analysis and optimize GPU-accelerated AI and software.
  • Tracxpoint: Achieved over 90% GPU utilization with Nsight Systems, reducing the training time of a deep learning model from 600 minutes to 90 minutes.

Getting Started with NVIDIA Nsight Tools

To start optimizing your applications with NVIDIA Nsight tools, visit the NVIDIA Developer website to download the latest version of the tools and access comprehensive resources, including tutorial videos and documentation.

Conclusion

NVIDIA Nsight tools are indispensable for developers aiming to unlock the full potential of NVIDIA Ampere GPUs. By providing a comprehensive view of application performance, these tools enable developers to identify and address bottlenecks, ensuring the delivery of the best user experience. Whether you’re working on real-time ray tracing, AI, or high-performance computing applications, NVIDIA Nsight tools are the key to achieving peak performance.