Nsight Graphics, version 2019.3 can't run on Ubuntu16.04 with 430.26 Driver

Developer Tools Nsight Graphics
1

Nsight Graphics, version 2019.3 can’t run on Ubuntu16.04 with 430.26 Driver

2

Hi Liuty10,

Thanks for reporting this. Our last validation run showed this combination working, but i’ll see if our team can validate it once again.

Thanks,
Seth

3

Also, can you elaborate on “can’t run”? Does it crash on launch? or does it crash after some time?

4

Hi, thank you very much.
It was my bad. I thought that “nv-nsight-laucher” will launch an OpenGL program and pop up the nsight GUI.
Finally, I found that there is another binary file, “nv-nsight-gfx”, which started the nsight graphics GUI.
So, I can use this tool now. sorry about that.

But I have some other questions:
1)
I am analyzing a game(not written by me), remotely. When I capture a frame for live analysis, the Graphics/Compute Idle is always 100%.
The top SOLs : L2: 1.6%, VRAM: 1.3%, SM: 1.3%, TEX: 1.2%, CROP: 0.8%
SM Active is 4.3%
However, when I use Nvidia-smi without shutting down nsight graphics, the GPU utilization is 37% on my 1080Ti GPU.
I don’t know why GPU idle is always 100% while the utilization is 37%.

  1. I have another game. When I run the game without Nsight Graphics, the GPU utilization I got from Nvidia-smi is 55%. However, when I run the game with nsight graphics, I ssh to the game machine and found the GPU utilization drops to 25%.

I am really confused. Is the costs of nsight graphics very high? or because of my mis-operations?

Thank you very much

5

Hello,

Glad you are found the right bin to run!

  1. Interesting, this could be an issue with Range Profiler. We have quite a few fixes for it coming out in a couple weeks - it might be worth retrying with the next version.

  2. Nsight Graphics adds CPU load to be able to capture entire graphics frame at the stroke of a key. If your game is CPU bound, Nsight Graphics will add more CPU overhead and therefore reduce your GPU Utilization.

You may want to consider running Nsight Systems on both these applications to confirm both your apps are actually GPU bound. Range profiler will not be correct if the app is not GPU Bound.

Hope this helps!
Seth

6

OK. Thanks. I have tried Nsight system. But it seems that nsight system CLI can’t trace opengl APIs.
Here is my test program:

//gcc -o test test.c -lGL -lGLU -lglut
#include <GL/glut.h>
void init(void)
{
glClearColor(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glOrtho(-5, 5, -5, 5, 5, 15);
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
gluLookAt(0, 0, 10, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0);

return;

}

void display(void)
{
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
glColor3f(1.0, 0, 0);
glutWireTeapot(3);
glFlush();

return;

}

int main(int argc, char *argv)
{
glutInit(&argc, argv);
glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGB | GLUT_SINGLE);
glutInitWindowPosition(0, 0);
glutInitWindowSize(300, 300);
glutCreateWindow(“OpenGL 3D View”);
init();
glutDisplayFunc(display);
glutMainLoop();

return 0;

}

I use command: nsys profile --stats=true ./test

It only output Operating System Runtime API Statistics.

By the way, do you have any examples about identifying bottlenecks of openGL programs? Which case is CPU bound and which case is GPU bound? I can’t find any opengl examples in the document below:
https://docs.nvidia.com/nsight-systems/content/nsight_systems/2019.3.6-x86/06-cli-profiling.htm

7

Hello,

Looking at the code snippet you sent, it’s probably not CPU bound.

Looks like there might be an issue in Nsight Graphics then. Would you be able to share you sample and exact configuration so we can try to repro what you are seeing?

Thanks!
Seth

8

Hi, Seth
Thank you very much for your reply.

OK. I think you misunderstood me. Nsight GRAPHICS should be good. I tried to learn how to use nsight SYSTEM to identify CPU/GPU bound, but I didn’t find an OpenGL example in the document. This “test.c” program is just an example I used to learn how to use nsight SYSTEM.

For nsight SYSTEM:

  1. nsight SYSTEM CLI can’t output OpenGL trace, even through OpenGL trace is true. But I can trace OpenGL API in nsight SYSTEM GUI. But I do not know how to analyze the result, I am just trying to find more examples.

OS: ubuntu 16.04
CPU: Intel i7-7820X CPU@3.60GHz
GPU: 1080Ti
Nsight SYSTEM version: 2019.3.6
test case: the small piece of code above.

Thanks!