hello,
some time ago I wrote a raytracer and now I’m looking for ways to find performance bottlenecks. Can you recommend any tools?
I’m using Visual Studio 2003. I compiled everything into one executable file. Preferably I’d like to find out which classes/loops take the most time.
I’ve heard of VTune, but it’s not free and from intel, I have an AMD processor.
thanks!
You can profile for each specific platform, for example, taking advantage of the velocity engine on PPC, and using SSE3 on intel, etc.
Platform specific optimizations require specific tools for the platform.
AMD’s version of vTune is called CodeAnalyst.
http://developer.amd.com/cawin.aspx
If you’re just looking to find bad code to optimize, you can just step and stop through the code using VS 2003 and running MS’s tools to see what your system is doing
Also, following Microsoft’s best practices for using their optimizing compiler will always result in a faster runtime. For example, ensure you are setting the right flags for the compiler on a given platform, etc. And using techniques supported by the compiler if your using templates, etc. These will, of course, be different if you then decide to compile for linux using GCC on the same machine
Check out MSDN for more info on specific optimizations for VS 2003
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/01/COptimizations/
thanks. but does this mean that there is no straightforward way to test how much time certain functions take? For example, if I have a function RayTrace() which contains functions Specular(), Diffuse() etc, I would ideally like to know how much time (system time in percentages) the raytrace function takes, and this preferrably be subdivided in a tree-like way, showing the time those other functions take.
Have you checked out the AMD simulation utilities in conjunction with what panand said?
i know these are available for linux… not too sure bout windows but i would think they are
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.