Intel® GPA has deprecated support for macOS* Metal as of the Intel® GPA 2021.4 release. This functionality will be removed in future releases.
Prerequisites
- Download Intel® GPA for macOS*
- Have macOS* 10.15
Getting Started
Once Intel® GPA has been downloaded and installed navigate to the metal folder within the Package Contents by doing the following:
- Navigate to the application folder in Finder (/Applications/Intel)
- Right click on GPA Monitor and select "Show Package Contents"
- Select the Contents folder
- Select the Resources folder
- Copy the location of the metal folder
Now that you have copied the metal folder location, open up a terminal window and navigate to this folder:
cd <metal folder location>
Online Analysis
In the same terminal window that you used to navigate to the Intel® GPA Resources folder, you'll want to run the following command:
./gpa-capture [path to app] [flags]
the three main flags you can choose from:
- [-i] is for launcher injection, where the flag is used specifically for any title that requires a launcher to run the application
- [-s] is to capture a stream, where a stream is used for offline analysis playback
- [-a <arguments>] is to pass command-line arguments to the workload
To see all of the command line arguments that can be used for analysis type the following into your terminal window
./gpa-capture -h
The path to your application is dependent on whether you have a standalone application or an application that runs through a launcher (such as Steam or Blizzard). If your application runs through a launcher, then we'll need to run the command on the path to the launcher (not to the game) and set our launcher injection flag:
./gpa-capture /Applications/Steam.app -i
Once Steam launches (or any other launcher), login and run your game normally. If the game is a Metal application, Intel® GPA will automatically inject into it.
If injection was successful, you will see the Heads-up Display (HUD) in the top-left corner of the game. This allows you to see real-time metrics for your macOS* Metal application. The HUD can be:
- Toggled on/off using F7
- Moved using F3
- Fit to screen with F5
- And can pause/resume the application and bring up the Frame Analysis window using F12
Offline Analysis
Offline analysis is done in the same "Resources" folder as online analysis. With offline analysis, however, we grab the stream file that was captured in online analysis.
Note: To capture a stream you must use the "-s" flag during online analysis:
./gpa-capture /Applications/yourGame.app -s
To analyze the chosen stream file, run the following command:
./analyze-stream ~/Documents/GPA/xxxxx.gpa-stream
Replacing the "xxxxxxx.gpa-stream" with the name of the stream you would like to analyze. Once the command is executed, a player will be brought up that plays back the stream of your application with GPA injected. Pressing F12 will pause this playback and allow you to analyze the frame you are currently paused on, executing F12 again will continue the playback.
This will be the initial playback that you see when the command is executed.
Pressing F12 will bring up this window, which allows you to analyze the paused frame.
For more information on the usage of Intel® GPA see the User Guide.
"