Nvidia releases a performance and debug tool for Linux

NVPerfKit is a comprehensive suite of performance tools to help debug and profile OpenGL and Direct3D applications. It gives you access to low-level performance counters inside the driver and hardware counters inside the GPU itself. The counters can be used to determine exactly how your application is using the GPU, identify performance issues, and confirm that performance problems have been resolved.

NVPerfKit 2.1 now includes support for 64-bit Windows platforms, as well as 32-bit and 64-bit Linux platforms. Other improvements include an updated installer, Release 90 driver support, enhancements to NVPerfHUD, and more.

The performance counters are available directly in your OpenGL and DirectX applications and in tools such as Intel® VTune™ and Graphic Remedy’s gDEBugger via the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Performance Data Helper (PDH) interface. A plug-in supporting Microsoft PIX for Windows is also provided, giving you low-latency access to NVPerfKit performance counters directly from the driver.

NVPerfKit consists of the following components:

* Instrumented Driver
o Interfaces with graphics API and GPU to provide performance counter data
o Automatically installed by NVPerfKit installer
* NVPerfHUD
o Advanced real-time analysis of Direct3D applications
* NVPerfSDK
o API for accessing GPU signals in your applications
o Sample code and helper classes for OpenGL(tm) and DirectX(tm) applications
o NVIDIA Developer Control Panel and instrumented driver
* NVIDIA Plug-in for Microsoft PIX for Windows
* GLExpert
o Debug OpenGL usage errors and performance issues
* Support for PerfMon, Intel(r) VTune(tm), gDEBugger, and other analysis tools
* gDEBugger 30-day trial version

Because NVPerfKit 2 has many new features and components, we recommend that you take a look at our "GPU Performance Tuning with NVIDIA Performance Tools" talk from GDC 2006. The NVPerfKit User Guide contains detailed information about the NVPerfSDK API, GLExpert, and NVPerfKit's other components. Please let us know if you have any questions or encounter any problems by e-mailing nvperfkit at nvidia.com.

[Download] NVPerfKit 2.1 Installer for 32-bit Linux (2006-09-11)
[Download] NVPerfKit 2.1 Installer for 64-bit Linux (2006-09-11)