perlfu/gfxreconstruct

Graphics API Capture and Replay Tools for Reconstructing Graphics Application Behavior

Project Goals

The primary goal for the GFXReconstruct project is to create an improved version of LunarG's vktrace software for capture and replay of Vulkan API calls. As development progresses, existing vktrace functionality such as trimming and client-server mode will be integrated with the GFXReconstruct codebase. When GFXReconstruct reaches feature parity with vktrace, vktrace will be deprecated in favor of GFXReconstruct.

The initial focus of this effort was to improve the code generation process responsible for generating the Vulkan API call encoding and decoding code, to address some code maintenance and Vulkan API version update issues present with the existing vktrace software. It has also offered an opportunity to explore potential performance and feature enhancements, such as compression for capture files (currently available) and support for multi-threaded replay (to be added in the future).

Stability

The GFXReconstruct project is currently Beta quality software. The primary consideration for stability is the capture file format. While this format does not change regularly, it is not yet finalized and may change in ways that are incompatible with the existing format as new features (eg. multi-threaded replay and trimming) are implemented. Once these features are implemented and considered stable, the file format will be assigned a 1.0 version, at which point backward compatibility will be guaranteed across GFXReconstruct versions.

Project Components

The GFXReconstruct project provides tools for the capture and replay of Vulkan API calls, allowing the graphics commands executed by a Vulkan application to be recorded to a file that may later be replayed to reconstruct the graphics-specific behavior of the captured application. The replay code has been organized with a framework design to make it easy to create additional tools for processing capture files. Although the software is currently exclusive to the Vulkan API, it has been designed such that support for additional graphics APIs is possible.

The GFXReconstruct components currently provided with this repository are:

• The VK_LAYER_LUNARG_gfxreconstruct Vulkan layer for capturing Vulkan application commands.
• The gfxrecon-replay tool to replay GFXReconstruct capture files.
• The gfxrecon-info tool to print information describing GFXReconstruct capture files.
• The gfxrecon-compress tool to compress/decompress GFXReconstruct capture files.
  • NOTE: The gfxrecon-compress tool requires LZ4, Zstandard, and/or zlib, which are currently optional build dependencies.
• The gfxrecon-extract tool to extract SPIR-V binaries from GFXReconstruct capture files.
• The gfxrecon-toascii tool to convert GFXReconstruct capture files to an ASCII listing of API calls.

Contributing

If you intend to contribute, the preferred work flow is for you to develop your contribution in a fork of this repo in your GitHub account and then submit a pull request. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file in this repository for more details

Building

Instructions for building the contents of this repository can be found in the BUILD.md documentation.

Usage

Instructions for using the GFXReconstruct capture and replay tools can be found at the following locations:

• Desktop Usage
• Android Usage

License

This work is licensed under the terms of the MIT License; see LICENSE for more information.