Vulkan frame capture on Linux

[Saunders__Benjamin]

I'm trying to investigate the performance of a Vulkan application I'm developing on Linux. I'm running kernel 5.6.14, Mesa 19.3.3, Vulkan SDK 1.2.131, and vulkaninfo confirms the availability of the VK_INTEL_performance_query device extension. I've installed version 20.1.1585397060 of the analyzers. My distro is NixOS, so I had to get a bit creative to get the analyzers working, but the system analyzer does successfully chart various CPU and GPU performance counters.

Graphics Monitor displays "Supported APIs: OpenGL" and doesn't seem to be able to interact with my application; no overlay is displayed and attempts to capture a frame have no effect. How does Graphics Monitor determine Vulkan API support? Is there something I might have missed in adapting it to NixOS?

[Claire_H_Intel]

Hi Benjamin, 

Thank you for using Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers for your profiling and optimization needs. At this time the Intel GPA team only tests and supports Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. We recently updated our Enabling Vulkan* VK_INTEL_performance_query extension instructions for Ubuntu, but these instructions have not been tested on NixOS and additional adaptations may be required. It's also important to mention that while implementing the VK_INTEL_performance_query extension you must be using an 8th generation or newer Intel GPU. 

[Saunders__Benjamin]

Hi, thanks for the response. As I outlined in the original post, I have successfully enabled VK_INTEL_performance_query. I'm using an i7-8550U, and the system analyzer does appear to successfully access a wide range of GPU performance counters. I understand that NixOS is not officially supported, but I hope that if you can share details on why "Supported APIs" might not list Vulkan, I might make progress in getting it working myself.

[Claire_H_Intel]

Hi Benjamin, 

Currently Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers support for Vulkan on Ubuntu is very limited and metric enabling is very complicated so we do not claim to support it. Once support for Vulkan is shipped with vanilla Ubuntu we will claim support for it. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, I'll make sure to relay your concerns to the rest of the GPA team. 

[Pamela_H_Intel]

Benjamin,

FYI: as of our last release we support Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04, and Vulkan 1.2.

Often with different flavors of Linux, the differences are in path name setup. Please verify your environment vars point to the correct locations.

As Claire says, our support for Ubuntu is limited. But we continue to increase compatibility with D3D12 and Vulkan for all OSs.

Pamela