New Dev Tool Shows Graphic Display of Code Bottlenecks

RAD Game Tools, Inc. has announced the release of Telemetry, RAD’s revolutionary new programmer-driven game profiling system.

“Telemetry allows game programmers to visualize execution flow both hierarchically, and linearly,” according to Brian Hook, chief developer on the Telemetry project, “and unlike profiling tools that hand you back a page of numbers to analyze, Telemetry shows, in a very visual and highly interactive display, exactly where performance hotspots are occurring, and what threads are contributing to those hotspots.”

Telemetry is based on a client/server architecture, where the game transmits performance information to a server that captures and processes incoming data. Once a performance hotspot is identified on screen, the Telemetry client, or Visualizer, provides an easy and intuitive method of “drilling down” into a frame’s code to identify the underlying performance issues such as lock contention, busy waits, or excess idle time. The Visualizer also enables users to understand thread interactions, watch memory activity, graph game-specific variables and send printf-style messages to the server.

Telemetry accomplishes its profiling by a user instrumenting an application with simple markup functions to define areas of execution. Once analysis is complete and the game is ready for release, the Telemetry integration is removed with a simple recompilation.

“During our integration and evaluation of Telemetry, the software kept revealing performance bottlenecks in our games we didn’t even know existed,” said Halldor Fannar, Chief Technical Officer at CCP. “The designers of Telemetry understand that visualizing large and complex performance data sets is the key to understanding performance problems-and they have solved that problem elegantly.”

The Telemetry server enables multiple machines to stream data to another computer. This allows, for example, testers to generate data sets for analysis by the development team. It also allows for the bulk of data processing to be off-loaded to another machine, reducing potential interference on the host machine.

Telemetry forWindows is available now from RAD Game Tools. Other platforms will be announced soon. For more information on pricing or to purchase Telemetry, call 425-893-4300 or email sales3 [at] radgametools [dot] com.

The official product page for Telemetry can be found at: http://www.radgametools.com/telemetry.htm

Following are some images of the Telemetry visual displays.  Larger, clearer images are available on the official product page, above.