Capture a frame profile

The Frame Profiler in Android Performance Analyzer extracts performance data for a single frame in your game. This guide provides in-depth information about how to configure and run a frame profile that meets your needs.

Capture a profile

After you've created a new project or opened an existing one, you can click the Record Trace button on the left side of the title bar to open the New Capture window.

Select Frame and click Configure to open the Configure a GFXR Recording window.

From this window, you can configure your profiling options. When you're finished, click OK to open the Control Recording window. The app under test starts on your testing device automatically.

When you reach the frame that you want to profile, click Start. Android Performance Analyzer retrieves the data for that single frame, then opens the output file in the trace view automatically. The data in the frame profile appears as the Frame Profiler finishes each task.

Configure a profile

In the Configure a GFXR Recording window, you can configure your frame profile prior to running it.

Device

The Device drop-down in the Device section selects a connected device to use for testing. Android Performance Analyzer runs device validation on the selected device. When validation is complete, the drop-down displays either a green checkmark to indicate successful validation or a Retry button.

When a supported device is connected, the name of its GPU appears beneath the Device dropdown.

Application

The drop-down menus under the Package label selects an app to record for your trace. The left drop-down chooses whether or not to filter the list to only debuggable apps, and the right drop-down selects the app package to run.

The Activity drop-down selects a specific activity from the app. You can also select Default to use the app's default startup activity.

If you picked an activity other than Default, you can use the Additional arguments field to add arguments.

Output

The Output file name field in the Output section lets you define a custom name for the trace file generated by the current trace. You can also use the following variables in a custom trace file name:

• ${device_model} - The model of the testing device.
• ${device_name} - The name of the testing device, as shown in About phone > Device name.
• ${device_serial} - The serial number of the testing device.
• ${package_name} - The package name for the app under test.
• ${package_name_short} - A shortened form of the package name for the app under test.
• ${timestamp} - A timestamp indicating when the trace file was created.

You can preview the final filename after variable substitutions below the Output file name field.