We are proud to announce that the latest version of our profiling tool suite for mobile, 2024.0 is now available to download and use for free. In this release, we have a few changes to tell you about. We have a new name, a new tool in the bundle, and we have enhanced some of the features in Arm Frame Advisor.
Read on to learn about the new features and changes in this release. You can also refer to the Release Note for details on bug fixes and known issues.
From this release, Arm Mobile Studio will be named Arm Performance Studio. Do not worry, there is no reduction in functionality, and all the tools are still available for free. The change in name reflects the fact that our tools are not just limited to mobile applications. We have a broad range of developers across a variety of consumer devices utilizing them to make significant performance and efficiency optimizations.
We have always been dedicated to helping application developers make their apps run faster on Arm-based mobile devices. When we launched Arm Mobile Studio back in 2019, we were so excited to offer our performance analysis tools to developers for free, along with our training and best practices materials. Since that journey began, we have made our tools better, faster and easier to use. With your help and feedback, we have introduced new tools and features to address the demands of this very special industry.
Our commitment to the mobile gaming industry has not changed - we are simply helping more developers succeed across all Arm platforms.
We have a wealth of useful information online, so it may take some time for the new name to be updated everywhere. Please bear with us while we transition all the content.
RenderDoc has become an industry standard tool for debugging Vulkan graphics applications. This release is our first release including binary builds of RenderDoc, that add early support for Arm GPU extensions and Android features. Our intention is to work with Baldur, who maintains the upstream tool, and contribute as many of these changes upstream as possible. However, our prebuilt binary builds will tend to run ahead of our upstream contributions as that process takes some time.
'RenderDoc for Arm GPUs' is based on the upstream RenderDoc v1.31 release and adds early support for Vulkan API ray query capture and replay. This release only supports on-device acceleration structure builds. Host-side acceleration structure builds will be added in a future release.
Refer to the Vulkan extension specification for full details.
In December, we made our first release of Frame Advisor, a new tool focused on frame-based profiling workflows. We have received some great feedback from the developer community, and have been working to incorporate that feedback, alongside bug fixes, and performance improvements.
See Frame Advisor in action in this video:
The Render Graph view is the entry-point for frame review. Providing an easy way to see data flow between render passes in a frame and to quickly find redundant attachment writes and even entirely redundant render passes.
Early feedback from developers was that this view could be quite cluttered for more complex applications. This release simplifies the visualization with more compact graph nodes, and merged graph edges.
The Content Metrics view provides a detailed breakdown of geometry metrics for each draw command, helping developers identify inefficient mesh indexing and buffer memory layout. To make it easier to find problem draws using the Content Metrics summary table, we have introduced two new top-level metrics:
Frame Advisor is still very much a tool in active development. As a result, we wanted to give some visibility of what is on our near-term roadmap over the next 6 months:
Thank you to those of you who have tried Frame Advisor and sent us your feedback. We really appreciate your time and input, and try to plan in as many suggestions as we can. If you have any product feedback on any of our tools, please use this form to tell us what you think.
We are traveling to San Francisco in March for the annual Games Developer Conference (GDC). Come and see us at the Arm booth. We will be demoing our tools and running useful lightning talks about the kinds of graphics problems you can solve with them. Please drop by and tell us about your experiences optimizing for mobile. We look forward to seeing some of you there.
The lightning talks will cover topics such as introductions to the tools in Arm Performance Studio, and how to profile and optimize your application for mobile. We will also talk about the latest technology Arm brings to mobile gaming, such as ray tracing on mobile and how to use AI in your game project.
Here are the technology talks we will present at GDC:
If you have not yet tried our profiling tools, you can download and use them for free, by visiting the Arm Developer website. You need to log in with an Arm account to access the download. If you do not have one, you can create one easily for free. And when you have tried our tools, please let us know what you think. If you have ideas about how we could improve them, please let us know.
Download Arm Performance Studio