GPU Timing

OpenGL is asynchronous, which means that function calls aren’t guaranteed to execute right away. This can make performance analysis of OpenGL operations difficult, as the graphs may not accurately reflect the actual time that the GPU spends doing a certain operation. However, if you wish to more accurately track down rendering bottlenecks, you may set the following configuration variable:

pstats-gpu-timing 1

This will enable a new set of graphs that use timer queries to measure how much time each task is actually taking on the GPU. The GPU process is represented in PStats as though it were a separate thread.

Note

Please make sure you are at least using Panda3D 1.10.12 when trying to use this feature. Older versions had a bug that made GPU timing not work correctly with some graphics cards. Panda3D 1.11.0 has even more improvements for this feature, so you will get the best results by updating to the very latest version.

If your card does not support it or does not give reliable timer query information, a crude way of working around this and getting more accurate timing breakdown, you can set this:

gl-finish 1

Setting this option forces Panda to call glFinish() after every major graphics operation, which blocks until all graphics commands sent to the graphics processor have finished executing. This is likely to slow down rendering performance substantially, but it will make PStats graphs more accurately reflect where the graphics bottlenecks are.