Metal Shader Debugging and Profiling

https://medium.com/@nilotic2/metal-shader-debugging-and-profiling-48da25a400e8

Metal Shader Debugging and Profiling

WWDC 2018

Metal Frame Debugger

• Step through API calls
• Resource inspection
• Shader edit and reload
• GPU counters
• Pipeline statics
• Integrated into Xcode
• Dependency viewer (new)
• Geometry viewer (new)
• Shader debugger (new)
• Enhanced shader profiler (new)

Geometry Viewer

• Visualize the post-vertex transform data in 3D
• Access to all vertex data
• Per-draw call view

Visibly Wrong Triangles

Out of Frustum Objects

Missing Triangles

Why use Shader Debugger?

• Math heavy code
• Highly parallel
• Unity’s “Book of the Deed”
  - ~10 million vertex shader invocations
  - ~60 million pixels rendered

Shader Debugging

• New tool for debugging Metal shaders
• Rich variable visualization across thousands of threads
• Real data from GPU
• Flexible stepping
• Integrated into Metal Frame Debugger

Demo

Problem (negative value)

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Fining the bug

Values in realtime

Call Stack

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Fix the Bug

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Refresh

(You don’t need to rebuild)

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Starting the Shader Debugger

Inspecting Variables

Following the Execution

Flexible stepping

Use filter to focus

Access to Other Threads

Set of threads are available based on the initial selection

• Vertex — Primitive of the selected vertex
• Fragment — Rectangle around the selected pixel
• Compute — Threadgroup of the selected thread

See Variables in Context

• Helps you understand your code
• Important to for comparing good/ bad values
• Hover for instant access

Comparing Good and Bad Pixels

• Quickly compare threads
• Execution history and variables and updated for the selected thread

Understanding Divergence

• Mask shows which threads executed the same line to help you understand control flow

Demo

Problem

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Finding the Bug

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QA

Shader Debugger

• Specifically designed for debugging Metal shaders
• Great for
  - Fixing bugs!
  - Understanding your shader
  - Developing your shaders
• Supports iOS, macOS, and tvOS
• Available in Xcode 10

Knowing What to Optimized

Profiling tools built into Metal Frame Debugger

• GPU counters

• Pipeline statistics

• Shader profiler

Shader Profiler

• Provides per-pipeline timing information

• Per-line execution cost (iOS and tvOS)

• Shader edit and reload
• Get into shader debugger

Enhanced Shader Profiler for A11

• Instruction category cost breakdown per line
  - ALU — Float, half, and complex
  - Memory — Sample, load, and store operations
  - Synchronization — Wait memory, barriers, or atomics

• Visibility into inline function cost

Demo

Access to Shader Sources

• New Metal Compiler option
• Xcode project
  - “Yes, include source code” from build settings
• Command line
  - “-MO” compiler option

• iOS
• Wwdc 2018
• Metal
• Graphics And Games
• Metal Shader