Tools, Profiling, and Debugging

Build a Metal function library at the command line, or use Xcode to debug issues, and improve performance.

Framework

• Metal

Topics

Files and Libraries

See information and steps to create Metal shaders and shader libraries.

Use the .metal filename extension to gain access to Metal's build, profile, and debug tools.

Use command-line tools to run the Metal compiler toolchain.

Frame Capture

View a summary of the Metal commands you submit in a single frame and drill down on specific areas for development and debugging purposes.

Use Xcode tools or Metal API to capture a runtime snapshot of your app's Metal commands and state.

Assign meaningful labels to your Metal objects and commands so you can easily identify them in the call list of a captured frame.

View your render passes as a flow chart and inspect individual resource dependencies to understand which commands wait on others to complete.

Debugging

Use a suite of tools to debug and develop Metal shaders.

Find problems with geometry by navigating a free-fly camera outside of your camera's frustum and checking vertex values.

Step through shader execution with the ability to inspect variable values and update shader code in place.

Profiling and Metrics

Use informational panels to suggest the best use of your optimization effort and the biggest performance wins.

Use Xcode or macOS tools to view a high-level summary of the GPU activity of your app or a Mac.

View the elapsed execution time of individual statements in your shader to understand where it spends the most time.

Ensure that properties related to an encoder's rendering are within the desired range.

See relative percentages of where a given draw call spent its time across the GPU architecture.