A truly incredible profiler for the great price of free. There is nothing coming at this level of features and performance even on paid software. Tracy could cost thousands of dollars a year and would still be the best profiler.

Tracy requires you to add macros to your codebase to log functions/scopes, so its not an automatic sampling profiler like superluminal, verysleepy, VS profiler, or others. Each of those macros has around 50 nanoseconds of overhead, so you can liberally use them in the millions. On the UI, it has a stats window that will record average, deviation, min/max of those profiler zones, which can be used to profile functions at the level of single nanoseconds.

Its the main thing i use for all my profiling and optimization work. I combine it with superluminal (sampling profiler) to get a high level overview of the program, then i put tracy zones on the important places to get the detailed information.

I am a beginner in graphics programming, and I came across this amazing frame profiler.

Web demo of Tracy: https://tracy.nereid.pl/

This blows my mind. It's so fast and responsive I never expected a WebAssembly application to be!

My favorite FOSS video game, Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers (http://kartkrew.org), has Tracy support! It’s not compiled into the default build. I’ve learned a lot reading the code.

This article is a good quick introduction to Tracy: https://luxeengine.com/integrating-tracy-profiler-in-cpp/

I just started using this yesterday, it looks really good. Haven’t really dug into it.

Is the latest windows build broken for anyone else? It doesn’t start. In WinDbg it looks like it dereferences a null pointer. I built it myself and it works fine.

Can someone explain how this achieves nanosecond resolution? That's an extremely difficult target to reach on computing hardware due to inherent clock resolutions and interrupt timing.

Tracy is brilliant. @wolfpld I hope you're enjoying reading this and all of the other great comments in this thread. Great work and thank you very very much!

Does anybody have an opinion or comparison with respect to easy_profiler?

https://github.com/yse/easy_profiler

Especially interesting if based on real practical experience.

can someone explain how is profiling tools like this written for GPU applications? wouldn't you need access to internal runtime api?

for ex. Apple wraps Metal buffers as "Debug" buffers to record allocations/deallocations.

I always squint a little bit when folks mention nanoseconds.

The overheard of observing the time is around 60 nanoseconds.

Light travels about a foot in a nanosecond.

Below ~500 nanoseconds, things get fuzzy.

Can anyone with experience suggest pointers on arguing Tracy vs perfetto? My team uses perfetto and I highly suspect we are running into artefacts due to that.