How to check Early Z efficiency on AMD GPU with Windows 7
- by Suma
I have a game using DirectX 9, and a development station using Win 7 x64. I am still able to get access to another station with Vista x64 / dual booted with WinXP x86.
I wanted to check early Z efficiency in the game and to my sadness all tools I have tried seem to be unable to perform this task:
AMD PerfStudio
AMD GPUPerfStudio 2 does not support DirectX 9 at all
AMD GPUPerfStudio 1.2 does not install correctly on Windows 7. When I have tweaked the MSI package (a simple OS version check adjustment was needed), it complained the drivers I have do not provide needed instrumentation. The drivers old enough to support the GPUPerfStudio would most likely not be able to operate with my Radeon 5750 card (though this is something I am not 100 % sure, I did not attempt to try any older drivers, not knowing which I should look for)
PIX
PIX does not seem to contain any counters like this. It offers some ATI specific counters, but when I try to activate them, the PIX reports "PIX encountered a problem while attaching to the target program."
I do not want to upgrade to DX 10/11 just to be able to profile the game, but it seems without the step I am somewhat locked with a toolset which is no longer supported.
I see only one obvious options which would probably work, and that is using WinXP (or with a little bit of luck even Vista) station, perhaps with some older AMD card, to make sure GPUPerfStudio 1.2 works.
Other than that, can anyone recommend other options how to check GPU HW counters (HiZ / EarlyZ in particular, but if others would be enabled as well, it would be a nice bonus) for a DirectX 9 game on Windows 7, preferably on AMD GPU? (If that is not possible, I would definitely prefer switching GPU to switching the OS, but before I do so I would like to know if I will not hit the same problem with nVidia again)
