App and game development with GPU debugging

9th April 2018

Enaie Azambuja

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Imagination Technologies has announced PVRStudio, a fully featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that simplifies app and game development on embedded and mobile platforms. With PVRStudio 2018 Release 1, developers get a highly capable debugger for PowerVR GPUs, and can also debug programs that are executing on the CPU hardware at the same time as they are debugging programs on the GPU.

For developers creating apps and games for products that use a PowerVR GPU, PVRStudio provides fine granularity debugging through direct access to programs running on the GPU’s unified shading core (USC), where most of the critical calculations for 3D graphics and compute applications are carried out.

This will allow developers to deliver amazing visual experiences with minimum power consumption.

Mark Butler, VP, PowerVR software graphics engineering, Imagination Technologies, says: “PVRStudio represents a new kind of debugger for mobile and embedded GPUs since it gives developers the powerful ability to step into instances of shader executions on the USC".

"For the first time, developers can debug an embedded/mobile GPU much like they have been doing on the CPU for decades, and seamlessly step from the CPU into the GPU within the same session.”

PVRStudio’s concurrent debugging capability includes breakpoints, code stepping and memory layout of graphics shaders and compute kernels. It is based on the popular Qt software development framework, making it robust but lightweight, highly flexible, and familiar to developers who already use Qt Creator as their primary IDE.