renderdoc VS apitrace

heh https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc#readme is all "RenderDoc is intended for debugging your own programs only. Any discussion of capturing programs that you did not create will not be allowed in any official public RenderDoc setting, including the issue tracker, discord, or via email" but the 3 of the 4 screenshots are of dota2 :-D

Still, that looks handy for sure

He's pretty clear about it every time it's asked. Tracing copyrighted games is legally questionable, and tools like RenderDoc are often abused by people to do illegal asset ripping/reselling.

Baldur explains why he won't implement bindless texture support in this issue: https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/issues/850

Unfortunately the main developer for Renderdoc is against adding ray tracing support : https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/issues/2317

RenderDoc bug report: https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/issues/2800

Remember that Renderdoc is open source: https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/. This means you can build it with symbols and attach a debugger.

Renderdoc works by inserting itself as a Vulkan layer, which means it can change the output of functions if it so chooses. As you can see in the RenderDoc version of vkEnumeratePhysicalDevices it changes how devices are returned, and this likely is the reason the order changes.

You have several tools, this can be done by printing debug messages using extensions such as KHR_debug, or using specific tools which will inject themselves between your OpenGL calls and your driver such as apitrace or RenderDoc. I recommend running your program in RenderDoc regularly even if everything seems to work fine as it may help you catch some subtle bugs.

That said, the profiling situation for non-NV users is not completely hopeless. You can still use API timer queries to get an idea of how long events take on the device. Tracy also supports GPU profiling, but I suspect it's just a fancy way of inserting timer queries. apitrace also claims to support profiling OpenGL apps, but I'd be wary of overhead as it's doing a lot of other things besides profiling.

At first I thought Feral probably used it accidentally, but this thread about the symbol's use in apitrace seems to shed some light:

I don't see anything wrong with your code, altough I'm not familiar with Avalonia or Silk. I suggest you try to use apitrace for (a probably long and painful day) debugging it.

I get that it's hard to debug without direct access, but isn't there some dump or log that they could generate and provide? Maybe something like using apitrace?

Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer @pepp · 6 months ago Developer https://github.com/apitrace/apitrace/blob/master/docs/USAGE.markdown is the basic doc. For Steam games I usually go to the game's folder (probably $HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Indivisible) and try to run the game with apitrace (apitrace trace indivisible-executable). It should print a line to indicate where the trace file is written to (apitrace: tracing to somefile.trace.