Think Silicons’s NEMA®|GFX-API is not only a graphics API, but it also serves as an API for having direct access to GPU hardware, e.g., by handling interrupts, by dispatching command lists to the GPU, and/or by accessing the GPU configuration registers. Therefore, having a detailed understanding of NEMA®|GFX-API is essential to develop performance and power efficient code for NEMA® GPUs.
In order to be able to assess the performance of NEMA®|GFX-API-based applications and, in general, of the GPU SW stack (OpenGL®) that runs on top of it, Think Silicon® has made NEMA®|GFX-API visible to the LPGPU2 tool. This implies capturing timestamps for NEMA®|GFX-API function calls and their corresponding parameters and returning values gathered in a LPGPU2 tool suitable format. As it can be seen in the figure below, NEMA®|GFX-API function calls are now displayed in a timing diagram along with the rest of graphics APIs.
The red box shows a timing diagram displaying GPU SW functions (OpenGL) encapsulating NEMA®|GFX-API function calls
Extending the LPGPU2 tool with NEMA®|GFX-API support was a nice exercise. During this exercise, we gained expertise (and implemented the necessary code hooks in the tool) so as other vendors to be able to add support for their own or third-party graphics APIs in our tool.
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