AMD's Open Capture and Analysis Tool, or OCAT, is an indispensable tool in gathering frame-time data for modern games. The company has just posted a heads-up about a new build of OCAT, version 1.2, that adds a range of useful capabilities to the tool.
For folks who don't want to pull up Excel or Google Sheets and manually monkey around with plotting frame times against frame numbers, OCAT can now visualize the results of a given test run within the application. It can even plot multiple test runs against one another so you can see the effects of settings changes or other variables on performance. The app can save those visualizations as PDFs for easy sharing and reviewing later.
OCAT offers a performance overlay for keeping an eye on frame rates and frame times, and that overlay now works in VR headsets. The tool captures platform specific data like reprojection events now, too, so users can identify times where the host system isn't necessarily keeping up with a native HMD refresh rate. Users can also toggle data collection from those vendor-specific processing pipelines to isolate performance issues that take place upstream of VR compositors.
Finally, OCAT now gathers platform information about the underlying system. The tool will collect as much data about the host system's hardware as possible, including the operating system, CPU, host OS, graphics driver version, number of graphics cards, and AMD and Nvidia graphics-card names, core clocks, and memory sizes. In addition, the tool can grab AMD graphics-card memory speeds. Information for Intel graphics processors is limited to GPU family, core clock, and memory size.
OCAT is free and easy to use, so if you're at all interested in the graphics performance of your system, you owe it to yourself to download the latest release and give it a try. Hat tip to Keith May on Twitter for the heads-up.