Idea: developer drivers, debug output, break on error, and more

[dnutsch]

I would like to see graphcis drivers with some developer features. These would include:

1. Debug output
When there is a bad GL or D3D call, a message gets sent to stdout. This needs to be more descriptive than "invalid argument" or what glGetError reports.

2. Performance counters
The driver measures fps, textures, memory, etc, and makes counters available that can be used in perfmon

3. Break on error
The drivers throw an exception when there is an invalid GL on D3D call, so programmers can get the call stack at the time of the problem.

4. Other checks
The driver should complain about cases where there is no effect, such as zero alpha.

5. Control panel to enable/disable all of this.

[Chuck_De_Sylva]

What, you never heard of Dbgview? Or a real SW debugger?

[Philip_T_Intel1]

1) D3D debug output does this.
2) PIX enables you to determine performance characteristics of your app
3) D3D control panel has this option
4) D3D debug output does provide "INFO" and "WARN" output as well as "ERR"
5) The DX SDK installs a control panel for you, under Vista and beyond it does not show up in the control panel and must be found in the SDK menus, as I recall.

for OGL see gDEBugger from gremedy.com

[Joshua_D_Intel]

We also provide a powerful performance analysis suite called Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers which is available for free download at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-gpa/.