Upgrade for Mali Tools, with Support for OpenGL ES 3.1

ARM has released new major upgrades for the Mali Graphics Debugger and the OpenGL ES emulator, and an update for the offline shader compiler, adding support for OpenGL ES 3.1 and many other features. This is the last update for 2014, and concludes a year full of many releases and amazing new features, like overdraw and shader map modes, support for Android KitKat and Lollipop, ASTC textures, frame replay and support for all the ARM Mali GPU cores in the offline compiler. Additionally to those, today we present you three new releases, including key features like live shader editing, support for unrooted Android devices, compute shaders and indirect draw calls.

Mali Graphics Debugger v2.0

Mali Graphics Debugger allows developers to trace OpenGL ES and OpenCL API calls in their application and understand frame-by-frame the effect on the application to help identify possible issues. We support Android and Linux devices with ARM Cortex CPUs and Mali GPUs & Linux, Windows and Mac OS X hosts.

Key New Features

• OpenGL ES 3.1 support
  This means that all OpenGL ES 3.1 function calls will be present in a trace.
• Live editing
  • Support added for changing both the fragment and vertex shader of a program and then replaying the frame to view the results.
  • Support added to override textures in an application and replace them with a new texture that will aid in diagnosing any issues with incorrect texture coordinates.
  • Support added for overriding the precision of all elements in a shader and then replaying the frame to view the results (force highp/mediump/lowp modes)
  • New mid-level hierarchy in the outline view added so now draw calls are separated per framebuffer as well as per frame allowing the user to better visualize render passes.
• New Android application provided to support unrooted devices
• New view for compute shaders.
• User can now filter by frame feature to highlight interesting frames in larger traces.
• Support for making notes alongside function calls has been added. This allows important functions in a trace to be located easily.
• Support for most OpenGL ES extensions.

To learn more about Mali Graphics Debugger and performance analysis of graphics applications, you can watch the tutorials and presentations on YouTube.

Get Mali Graphics Debugger

Mali Graphics Debugger Daemon Application for Android

With the objective of making the installation of the graphics debugger on Android targets easier, we have developed an Android application that runs the required daemon. This eliminates the need to manually install executables on the Android device. The application (APK) works on rooted and unrooted devices.

Mali OpenGL ES Emulator v2.0

The OpenGL ES Emulator is a library that maps OpenGL ES 3.1 API calls to the OpenGL API. By running on a standard PC, the emulator helps software development and testing of next generation OpenGL ES 3.1 applications since no embedded platform is required. We support Linux and Windows PCs. Key new features

• OpenGL ES 3.1 support

We have put a lot of effort to make the emulator as close as possible to the Khronos standard OpenGL ES 3.1 API, executing the conformance suite and getting good conformance score on different platforms. Some tests cannot easily pass on desktop PCs, due to the nature of the underlying OpenGL driver; nevertheless we passed more than 94% of the conformance tests on our test platform.

Get OpenGL ES Emulator

Mali Offline Compiler v4.5

Mali Offline Compiler is a command line tool that translates vertex shaders and fragment shaders written in the OpenGL ES Shading Language (ESSL) into binary vertex shaders and binary fragment shaders for execution on the Mali GPUs. It generates statistics that are useful to optimize shader code. Key new features

• OpenGL ES 3.1 shader language support, including compute shaders
• Support for Mali ‘Midgard‘ driver version r5p0 (for Mali-T600 and Mali-T700 Series)
• Support for Mali ‘Utgard‘ driver version r5p0 (for Mali-400 MP and Mali-450 MP)

Get Mali Offline Compiler