AMD Radeon GPU Profiler vs apitrace

AMD Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) is a free low-level optimization tool for examining workloads on AMD Radeon GPUs. AMD positions it for PC game developers and developers optimizing applications for AMD RDNA hardware. It analyzes graphics and asynchronous compute usage, event timing, pipeline stalls, barriers, and bottlenecks. Frame and queue views show command-buffer submissions and interactions among graphics, compute, and copy workloads. Wavefront analysis links wavefronts to launching GPU events and displays cache information, while instruction timing reports average latency for AMD RDNA instructions to help locate shader hotspots. RGP supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics, plus OpenCL and HIP compute. It runs on Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with Linux limited to Vulkan. Version 2.7 is dated June 2026. Older APIs such as DirectX 11 and OpenGL are unsupported.

apitrace records OpenGL, Direct3D and DirectDraw API calls in trace files for replay and examination. Recorded calls can be replayed on another machine; OpenGL traces can also be replayed across operating systems. Its tools let users inspect graphics state and call data, view framebuffers and textures, edit trace files and profile performance. Coverage varies across APIs and operations: the feature matrix spans OpenGL 1.0–4.5, OpenGL ES 1.0–3.0, Direct3D 7–11.x and DirectDraw. Command-line profiling can capture frame, GPU, CPU and pixels-drawn data, with shader-profile formatting available through a script. The operating-system matrix lists Linux, OS X and Windows for tracing, replay, command-line and GUI use. Windows and Linux binaries are available for x86_64 and Arm64, with Windows x86 binaries also provided. The open-source project is licensed under MIT. One stated limitation is that programmatic Direct3D capture interfaces are unsupported. The maintainer says patches, issues and requests are handled as time permits, and the project links to a manual, bug-reporting guide, source-hacking guide, wiki and mailing list.