Profile an Android application with Arm Performance Studio
Introduction
Set up Arm Performance Studio
Set up an Android application for profiling
Interpret an example Arm Streamline report
Use Arm Streamline to capture data for your application
View an example Performance Advisor report
Create a Performance Advisor report for your application
Analyze your application with Frame Advisor
Debug your application with RenderDoc for Arm GPUs
Analyze shader program performance with Mali Offline Compiler
Next Steps

  Log an issue

  Fork and edit

  Discuss on Discord

Connect to your Android device

Frame Advisor offers in-depth frame-based analysis for mobile graphics in Android applications.

By capturing the API calls and rendering processes of a specific frame, you can identify performance bottlenecks that might slow down your application.

Start by connecting to your device.

  1. Launch the Performance Studio Hub and open Frame Advisor.

    • On Windows, search for Performance Studio.
    • On macOS and Linux, open the Performance Studio application file from the install directory.

    Image Alt Text:Screenshot of the Arm Performance Studio Hub showing the Frame Advisor launch card used to open Frame Advisor

  2. Select New trace to start a new trace.

    Image Alt Text:Screenshot of the Frame Advisor welcome screen showing the New trace button used to start a frame capture session

  3. Select your device, and the application that you want to capture frames from.

    Image Alt Text:Screenshot of Frame Advisor showing a connected Android device, a selected debuggable application, OpenGL ES selected, and the Next button for starting the session

  4. If your application uses the Vulkan API, change the selection in the API settings to Vulkan.

  5. Select Next to continue.

    Unless you chose the Pause on connect option in the Device connection screen, the application starts automatically on the device.

Capture a frame burst

After connecting to your device, you can capture a frame burst.

  1. The Capture screen provides options for your capture session.

    Image Alt Text:Screenshot of the Frame Advisor Capture frames for analysis screen showing the live application preview, frame count control, and Capture button

    When you approach the part of your game where the problem occurs, select Pause and use the Step button to focus in just before it.

  2. You can capture one frame burst of up to three consecutive frames. Adjust the Frame count as required.

  3. Select the Capture button to start capturing the frame burst. Wait for the capture to complete. This might take several seconds.

  4. Select Analyze to see the results. It might take a few minutes to analyze the data.

Analyze the capture

Frame Advisor presents the captured data in the Analysis screen. See your captured frames in the Frame Hierarchy view.

Image Alt Text:Screenshot of the Frame Advisor Analysis screen showing Frame Hierarchy, Render Graph, API Calls, Framebuffers, Content Metrics, and Detailed Metrics panels for a captured frame

Explore each frame to evaluate how efficiently they were rendered on the device.

  1. Look at the Render Graph to see how the frame was constructed.

    Image Alt Text:Render Graph view in Frame Advisor showing render passes connected by texture and render-buffer dependencies so unused attachments can be identified

    Evaluate the render graph to look for render passes or input or output attachments that aren’t used in the final output and can be removed to save processing power and bandwidth.

  2. Expand a frame in the Frame Hierarchy view, to see the render passes and draw calls within it. Step through the draw calls and watch the scene being built up in the Framebuffers view with each draw. Look for draw calls that can be eliminated, or identical draw calls that can be batched together.

    Image Alt Text:Framebuffers view in Frame Advisor showing the selected draw call output so you can step through how the frame is built

  3. In the Content Metrics view, sort draw calls by the number of primitives to find the most expensive objects. See whether these objects can be simplified.

    Image Alt Text:Content Metrics view in Frame Advisor sorted by primitive count with the Prims column highlighted to identify expensive draw calls

  4. For an expensive object, check the Detailed Metrics view to see how efficiently the object’s mesh is being rendered to the screen. Look for objects with duplicated vertices, or those that don’t efficiently reuse indices.

    Image Alt Text:Detailed Metrics view in Frame Advisor showing mesh complexity, locality, redundancy, and memory layout for the selected draw call

To see how to capture and analyze a problem frame with Frame Advisor, see the Capture and analyze a problem frame with Frame Advisor video tutorial .

What you’ve accomplished and what’s next

You’ve now analyzed your application with Frame Advisor.

Next, you’ll use RenderDoc for Arm GPUs to capture frames and select application events for debugging.

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