Profiling a graphics rendering without a profiler

Question

Nowadays we have pretty advanced tools to iron out rendering, allowing to see the different stages, time taken by draw calls, etc. But without them the graphics pipeline is quit

Answer 1

Note: I'm responding to the question: "Profiling a graphics rendering with a profiler", since that something I was looking for ;)

I'm working mostly on Mac, and I'm using multiple tools:

• gDebugger version 5.8 is available on Windows and Mac (this tool has been bought by AMD, the v6 version is Windows only). It gives you statistics about state changes, texture usage, draw calls, etc. It's also usefull to debug texture mapping, and see how your scene is drawn, step by step.
• PVRUniSCoEditor it's a shader editor. It compiles on the fly and give you precious details about estimated cycles and registers usage.
• Instruments (from XCode Utilities, OSX only), it gets informations from the OpenGL driver, it's great to find bottleneck since you can track what part of the GPU is used at 100% (tiler, renderer, texture unit, etc...)
• Adreno Profiler a Windows tool to profile Adreno-based mobile devices. (Very good tool if you work on Android apps ;))

What's your trick about the "dumb fragment shader to highlight the fillrate" ? (drawing a plain color ? or something more advanced ?)