Hi Nadia,
What software can I use to monitor how much of the graphics card is used when I run a certain application, that uses OSF? I want to see how much my application uses the GPU
In OSG you can use the stats handler (add osgViewer::StatsHandler to your viewer and press the 's' key at run time). This will give you timings for the Event, Update, Cull and Draw traversals, as well as an approximate GPU time if you have an nVidia card. ATI cards use a different extension for GPU timing and the StatsHandler was never modified to use that extension if available, so GPU timings are only visible when running on nVidia cards unfortunately.
Last time I checked, there was no free tool to do what you want other than the StatsHandler. There are FPS indicators (for example, Fraps on Windows), but FPS gives you little information about what's really going on.
Developers of DirectX apps can use NVPerfHUD to see lots of interesting things about their app, even do graphics profiling and identify bottlenecks (see the videos on http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvperfhud_home.html) but for OpenGL apps, the only thing that comes close is gDEBugger (http://www.gremedy.com/) which is a good tool but it's hard to compete with NVPerfHUD, which seems more advanced and costs nothing... We use gDEBugger to profile the graphics part of our OSG apps, and it works well when you have the instrumented graphics drivers installed too. You can get lots of insight on what's going on in your pipeline, what's causing slowdowns, etc.
But just to reiterate, in some cases the StatsHandler can be enough to show you the information you need. gDEBugger really lets you get into the internals of what the app is doing, but might be overkill if you just want to see how much time your app is spending in a given traversal and see if you can reduce that time.
Hope this helps, J-S -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
