Vulkan Vision: Ray Tracing Workload Characterization using Automatic Graphics Instrumentation

While there are mature performance monitoring, profiling and instrumentation tools to help understanding the dynamic behaviour of general-purpose GPU applications, the abstract programming models of graphics applications have limited the development of such tools for graphics. This paper introduces Vulkan Vision (V- Vision), a framework for collecting detailed GPU execution data from Vulkan applications to guide hardware-informed improvements. A core contribution of V- Vision is providing out-of-the-box data collection for capturing complete dynamic warp and thread execution traces. V- Vision also provides analyses for the follow purposes: identifying and visualizing application hotspots to guide optimization, characterizing application behaviour and estimating the effect of architectural modifications. This paper demonstrates the potential for these analyses in applications that utilize the recent ray-tracing extension in Vulkan and describes new insights about the applications and the underlying hardware.