Arm Performance Studio

Arm Performance Studio is a performance analysis tool suite for Android and Linux application developers.

It helps analyze how your game or app performs on production devices, so you can identify issues that affect performance, cause overheating, or drain battery life.

The following table lists the tools and describes their functions:

All features of Arm Performance Studio are available free of charge without a license.

How do I install Arm Performance Studio?

Arm Performance Studio is supported on Windows, Linux, and macOS hosts. Download the appropriate installer from Arm Performance Studio Downloads .

Full details about the supported OS and Android versions are given in the Arm Performance Studio Release Notes .

How do I install Arm Performance Studio on Windows?

Run the downloaded Arm_Performance_Studio_<version>_windows_x86-64.exe installer, and follow the on-screen instructions.

To open Streamline, Frame Advisor, or RenderDoc for Arm GPUs, go to the Windows Start menu and search for the name of the tool you want to open.

Performance Advisor is a feature of the Streamline command-line application. To generate a performance report, you must first run the provided Python script to enable Streamline to collect frame data from the device. Get started with Performance Advisor tutorial describes this process in detail. After you have captured a profile with Streamline, run Streamline-cli on the Streamline capture file. This command is added to your PATH environment variable during installation, so it can be used from anywhere.

    

        
        
Streamline-cli.exe -pa <options> my_capture.apc

    

To run Mali Offline Compiler, open a command terminal, navigate to your work directory, and run the malioc command on a shader program. The malioc command is added to your PATH environment variable during installation, so it can be used from anywhere.

    

        
        
malioc.exe <options> my_shader.frag

    

How do I install Arm Performance Studio on macOS?

Arm Performance Studio is provided as a .dmg package. To mount it, double-click the .dmg package and follow the instructions. The Arm Performance Studio directory tree is copied to the Applications directory on your local file system for easy access.

You can remove write permission from the installation directory to prevent other users from writing to it. This is done with the chmod command. For example:

    

        
        
chmod go-w <dest_dir>

    

Open Streamline, Frame Advisor or RenderDoc for Arm GPUs directly from the Arm Performance Studio directory in your Applications directory. For example, to open Streamline, go to the <installation_directory>/streamline directory and open the Streamline.app file.

To run Performance Advisor, go to the <installation_directory>/streamline directory, and double-click the Streamline-cli-launcher file. Your computer will ask you to allow Streamline to control the Terminal application. Allow this. The Performance Advisor launcher opens the Terminal application and updates your PATH environment variable so you can run Performance Advisor from any directory.

Performance Advisor is a feature of the Streamline command-line application. To generate a performance report, you must first run the provided Python script to enable Streamline to collect frame data from the device. This process is described in detail in the Get started with Performance Advisor tutorial . After you have captured a profile with Streamline, run the Streamline-cli command on the Streamline capture file to generate a performance report:

    

        
        
Streamline-cli -pa <options> my_capture.apc

    

To run Mali Offline Compiler, go to the <installation_directory>/mali_offline_compiler directory, and double-click the mali_offline_compiler_launcher file. The Mali Offline Compiler launcher opens the Terminal application and updates your PATH environment variable so you can run the malioc command from any directory. To generate a shader analysis report, run the malioc command on a shader program:

    

        
        
malioc <options> my_shader.frag

    

On some versions of macOS, you might see a message that Mali Offline Compiler is not recognized as an application from an identified developer. To enable Mali Offline Compiler, cancel this message, then open System Preferences > Security & Privacy and select Allow Anyway for the malioc application.

How do I install Arm Performance Studio on Linux?

Arm Performance Studio is provided as a gzipped tar archive. Extract this tar archive to your preferred location, using version 1.13 or later of GNU tar:

    

        
        
tar xvzf Arm_Performance_Studio_<version>_linux.tgz

    

You can remove write permission from the installation directory to prevent other users from writing to it. This is done with the chmod command. For example:

    

        
        
chmod go-w <dest_dir>

    

You might find it useful to edit your PATH environment variable to add the paths to the Streamline-cli and malioc executables so that you can run them from any directory. Add the following commands to the .bashrc file in your home directory, so that they are set whenever you initialize a shell session:

    

        
        
PATH=$PATH:<installation_directory>/streamline
PATH=$PATH:<installation_directory>/mali_offline_compiler

    

How do I get started with Arm Performance Studio?

Refer to Get started with Arm Performance Studio for an overview of how to run each tool in Arm Performance Studio.