More speed with Arm Mobile Studio 2023.1

It was fantastic to talk with so many of our customers at GDC this year. Hearing your stories about how you use Arm Mobile Studio tools to profile mobile games really inspires us to make them even better. Our team are committed to helping you create performant graphics for mobile. This is why we continue to enhance Arm Mobile Studio tools, and make them available to you for free.

This year, we have increased our release cadence, so that we can fix bugs and make new functionality available sooner. This blog covers the changes introduced in our last two releases, 2023.0 and 2023.1.

Performance Advisor refactored

The biggest change in this release is that Performance Advisor is no longer standalone and has been merged into the Streamline-cli command-line tool. The only real difference is that there is a change to the binary you must call to generate your Performance Advisor reports. This change gives our product team a much better foundation platform to build on for the future. One of the most requested features at GDC this year was the ability to capture and export a PA report from the Streamline GUI. This is the first step on that journey.

Refer to these migration instructions to see what you must do differently in the latest release (2023.1). And if you have not tried Performance Advisor yet, here is the getting started tutorial.

These releases also see several quality-of-life improvements to the capture configuration and report generation functionality. 

• The lwi_me.py command-line interface has been simplified, merging the --lwi and --lwi-mode options into a single argument.  
• The Vulkan interceptor now supports capturing slow frame screenshots. 

• The interceptor FPS counter has removed one frame of latency, which gives more accurate results in regions with unstable frame rates.   
• The interceptor FPS counter now reports a zero frame rate where a context is left idle rather than being destroyed. Previously it would propagate the last reported frame rate forever. 
• The Streamline-cli report generation will automatically select a process to use for multi-process applications, and also allows manual selection by either process name or PID.  

The Performance Advisor reports also gain some new functionality: 

• If you have annotated your game to add region labels, per-region FPS summaries are shown at the top of the report. This gives a quick-at-glance review and navigation to problematic areas.
  

Streamline refined

Streamline looks much the same as before, but we have improved the capture analysis performance and reduced the host tool memory footprint. This reduces analysis time for both Streamline and Performance Advisor, giving a better user experience and enabling longer captures or captures with higher sample rates. This release gives up to double the analysis performance for a typical game capture, and we expect to make further improvements in future releases. 

We have continued to make smaller quality-of-life improvements to the Streamline tool: 

• Arm Immortalis-G715 series counter templates now include a counter to show the fragment shading rate. This counter shows the number of fragments shaded per covered pixel, which applications can decrease by using variable-rate shading or increase by using sample-rate shading.

• CAM Job annotations now correctly support user-defined colors, enabling applications to create their own timeline visualizations using the Streamline annotation API or the Arm Mobile Studio for Unity package. 

• The Streamline-cli data exports for software profiling data can now be filtered by thread. 

Mali Offline Compiler improvements

Mali Offline Compiler is not our biggest tool, but it is a popular one. We spoke to many happy developers at GDC who make regular use of it for both manual investigations and automated regression tracking.  

We have not added any major new features this time around but continue to incrementally improve the data in the reports based on developer feedback. The changes in the 2023.1 release include: 

• Compiler backend for Arm Bifrost and Valhall GPUs updated to the r42p0 driver version.  

• Performance reports show a more accurate cost for
  • Fragment shaders using gl_FragCoord or similar functionality. 
  • The varying interpolation pipeline. 

If you have not tried Mali Offline Compiler before, watch our 7-minute training video to learn how to use it. 

Open-source projects 

Outside of Arm Mobile Studio, we continue to support developers with several tooling-related open-source projects on GitHub.  

astcenc 4.4 – in March we released a minor patch release for our ASTC texture compressor. This release gives a small performance boost, an image quality improvement, and support for building as a shared library directly from the standard CMake project. We also made some improvements to the ASTC developer guide. 

libGPUInfo 1.0 – in March we also released a new library, libGPUInfo. This small utility library allows applications to query the configuration of the Arm Immortalis or Arm Mali GPU present in the system. This information allows developers to adjust application workload complexity to match the performance capability of the current device. 

Did you know... our tools are free to use

Our goal is to help you create content that runs efficiently on a wide range of Android devices, not just the latest and greatest smartphones. We want your players to game for longer, without draining their battery or overheating their device. This is why we do not charge for our profiling tools. Arm Mobile Studio is free to download and use today from the Arm Developer website. You must create an Arm account and sign in to access the download. 

Look out for future releases, where we will make further improvements. Plus, later this year we are adding a new tool to the Studio that will help you quickly analyze a problem frame. You will be able to visualize the render graph and frame data flow to highlight inefficiencies, and easily find issues with geometry and rendering. 

In case you missed us at GDC, here’s Connor with a quick demo of our tools.

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