vkoverhead

vkoverhead is a tool for evaluating CPU-based overhead of Vulkan drivers. It was inspired heavily by drawoverhead from piglit.

Features

• extreme granularity for profiling specific scenarios
• simple to use
• CSV output for ease of script parsing
• zero dependencies

Building

Standard Meson build procedures should apply.

Cross-platform

This reuses code from Mesa and aims to be just as portable.

Usage

• ./vkoverhead to run all test cases
• ./vkoverhead -list to list all test cases
• ./vkoverhead -test 5 to run test case 5
• ./vkoverhead -start 5 to start with test case 5
• ./vkoverhead -submit-only to run only the submit-related test cases
• ./vkoverhead -nocolor to suppress color output (for scripting)
• ./vkoverhead -duration 5 to use a minimum duration of 5 seconds (default is 1 second)
• ./vkoverhead -help for a less helpful summary of available options

Interpreting Results

Results have 4 columns:

• Test ID
• Test name
• Test result
• Test result comparative performance

Each category of tests has a "base" case. Other cases in the category are compared against it, resulting in a percentage value which represents the overhead that each operation incurs. The goal is to have the percentage value for each case be as close to 100% as possible.