Gallium3D's "Heads-Up Display" Gets Some Early Love

The Gallium3D HUD that makes it very easy to show various driver/hardware related real-time performance metrics on a heads-up display drawn over OpenGL applications, has already received a few improvements.

In late March I wrote about the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display developed by Marek Olšák. This work by the famed independent Mesa contributor draws over any OpenGL window a "HUD" with various real-time performance information. Among the shown information is the real-time frame-rate, CPU load, number of pixels rendered, and more. With Mesa Git master, this HUD is rendered for any OpenGL window when the "GALLIUM_HUD" environment variable is set.

Some of the newly committed work to the HUD includes:

- Support for querying pipeline statistics. This work was done by Nouveau's Christoph Bumiller. The exposed pipeline statistics names are ia-vertices, ia-primitives, vs-invocations, gs-invocations, gs-primitives, clipper-invocations, clipper-primitives-generated, ps-invocations, hs-invocations, ds-invocations, and cs-invocations. (Per this commit.)

- VMware's "SVGA" virtual Gallium3D driver now supports queries to show the number of draw calls and the number of fallbacks. The fallback count shows the number of drawing calls that had to resort to using Gallium3D's "draw" module.

- VMware's driver now also handles showing the amount of used memory via the Gallium3D Heads-Up Display.