On Monday during GDC 2012, Intel released the latest version of its free Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA 2012) tool suite which now supports Ultrabooks as well as Android-based smartphones and tablets. Originally available only on PC platforms, Intel's GPA now helps developers improve the overall experience of game and media applications by accessing tools to analyze and optimize performance on both Intel's Core and Atom processor-based platforms.
"The tool suite enables developers to enhance application performance on smartphones, tablets, Ultrabooks and PCs," the company said on Monday. "Developers can also optimize Web content for browsers that support hardware-accelerated rich media, including Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox."
Intel GPA 2012 includes these four ingredients:
Intel GPA System Analyzer
Analyzes game performance and identifies potential bottlenecks that slow down performance or affect graphics. This tool allows developers to perform optimization experiments to fine-tune performance without changing application code. New in Intel GPA 2012, Intel GPA System Analyzer now supports a standalone mode that enables real-time analysis of application performance on smartphones, tablets and Ultrabooks, including Android devices. Intel GPA System Analyzer can be used to analyze an application's power usage and how it will affect battery life on mobile devices.
Intel GPA Frame Analyzer
Offers application developers deep frame analysis of individual application elements such as shaders, textures and pixel history. Intel GPA Frame Analyzer shows the visual and performance impact of each individual element in real time without affecting the application source code.
Intel GPA Platform Analyzer
Developers can visualize performance of application tasks and the effect on devices by viewing CPU metrics and graphics workloads. PC application developers can also see how their software would perform in a multi-core environment. Intel GPA Platform Analyzer has been rebuilt from the ground up for the release of Intel GPA 2012 to provide more system behavior information. Additionally, the tool is capable of handling large volumes of data to emulate application performance on an extended run.
Intel GPA Media Analyzer
When used in conjunction with Intel Media SDK, Media Analyzer enables developers to see how effectively an application uses hardware-accelerated video encode and decode in real-time.
Essentially this toolset will allow developers to optimize their applications and Web-based content (Flash, HTML5) for power consumption so that they not only perform optimally, but run longer on battery-dependent Core and Atom-based devices like Ultrabooks, smartphones and tablets. "Gaming is one of the largest consumer segments for smartphones, but nobody wants a game that drains a smartphone battery," said Craig Hurst, Intel's director of Visual Computing Product Management.
Intel GPA 2012 is available as a free download at www.intel.com/software/gpa. Support for Android devices is expected to be publicly released this year, the company said.
