OpenGL Inspector (FRAPS equivalent) for OSX

[mhenr18]

While reading Anand's review of the rMBP I noticed the comment about the lack of a FRAPS equivalent for OSX. So, I did what any uni student with a 4 week holiday would do and got to work on one (after emailing Anand about it).

Right now I've only got the benchmarking side of things working (I'm about to get working on video recording) but I figured I'd share my work in progress.

This video shows a demo of a slightly older build where you had to authenticate every time you tried to sample a process, however now the authentication is done at launch (there's two dialogs, one for the 32 bit daemon and one for the 64 bit daemon). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGZ4ZRRV3GQ

Download (64-bit, Lion only):
http://mhenr18.com/gl/OpenGL Inspector.app.zip

 

[TheStu]

Looks good, excellent initiative. Frankly, i don't have much use for it (I say that now, but I will find a reason to use this for nerd bragging rights), but it looks straightforward and easy enough to use.

Keep us posted, what did Anand say?

 

[mhenr18]

Here's the email trail up to his response about my first demo video:

This is awesome!!! Great work

An overlay is useful but not a show stopper if it's not present, even making it optional and clear that it only works in some apps would be fine though.

Is there any chance you could have the tool automatically attach to a running foreground process? In the case of diablo 3 full screen it would be nice if your tool could just auto attach rather than requiring the user to cmd tab out, attach, then cmd tab back in. Not all games handle cmd tabbing back and forth so gracefully which is why this would be useful.

Hotkey support would also be a must have as you mentioned.

Take care,
Anand

On Jun 29, 2012, at 10:11 AM, Matthew Henry <> wrote:

After spending a while nutting things out and getting it all stable for both 32/64 bit processes, I figured I'd record a demo of what I've got in action (excuse the voiceover - it's not the greatest).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BehJsimNzLA

Clearly it needs more work, but now that I've got it stable adding things won't be hard at all. I've had a few attempts at drawing an overlay in the targeted application but my biggest issues there have been getting it to work reliably across all apps and not introducing any overhead from my code. Would the lack of an overlay be a show-stopper for you?

On 24/06/2012, at 3:58 AM, Anand Shimpi wrote:

Awesome! I can't wait!

On Jun 23, 2012, at 1:42 PM, Matthew Henry <> wrote:

Righto, I'll get back to you once I've got something worth your time. Shouldn't take too long - I already managed to get recording mostly working.

Matthew Henry


On 24/06/2012, at 3:26 AM, Anand Shimpi wrote:

Pretty much cloning FRAPS functionality would be great. Recording frame rate over time, calculating average, min, max, etc&#8230;

That would be a great start

On Jun 23, 2012, at 9:19 AM, Matthew Henry <> wrote:

While reading your review of the Retina MBP, I saw that you're interested in a FRAPS equivalent for OSX.

I've just finished a semester of uni so I've got 4 weeks of free time to build one - I've already thrown something together that injects custom code into any OSX OpenGL application and gives me full access to the OpenGL context every frame, allowing for things like recording and FPS display (which I'm implementing right now).

Are there any other capabilities that you'd want?

Matthew Henry

I haven't gotten any response yet from him about this build. To be honest I think the major appeal will be once I get recording working - as you can see in the demo video QuickTime's recording destroys my Mac's performance and in early builds I've had recording working at 60fps with a much lower CPU usage.

 

[TheStu]

Also, welcome to the forums, stay out of Off Topic for a while, well, stay out of Off Topic, Politics & News and Love & Relationships. For ever. Don't ever go there.

 

[mhenr18]

Haha, I've been in my fair share of forums over the years so I should be fine. Thanks

 

[ViRGE]

You've managed to impress The Boss. That's a very difficult thing to accomplish! Nice work.

 

[Aikouka]

If you can make it not crash the application if you alt-tab while recording, you've got a leg up on FRAPS. Was doing a bit of recording in Diablo III, and F9 was also bound to the achievement button. I had the overlay turned off, and started recording. I ALT-TAB'd, and when I tried to re-enter Diablo III, it crashed.

Chances are that's a DirectX issue, but that actually brings up an interesting idea for a feature that I don't think FRAPS has: always show overlay while recording. The overlay isn't always the prettiest thing to see on your screen, so I turn it off from time to time (also annoying that it takes so many presses of F12 to turn it off), but if I had it on while recording, I would notice when I'm actually recording (the numbers turn red).

 

[dawks]

Good job man! Really cool.. I'll be playing with this for sure.

 

[mhenr18]

I've decided to rename it to GLIT (GL Injection Tool) to more closely reflect what it actually does. Also, here's a screenshot of the new UI that I'm using:

 

[Aikouka]

The new name is a typo off of becoming rather racy!

 

[mhenr18]

The new name is a typo off of becoming rather racy!

Any ideas for something else?

 

[ViRGE]

Any ideas for something else?

Eh, the name is fine.

 

[Aikouka]

Well, if you told me that you made a "GL Injection Tool", I would personally not have any idea of what you're talking about. I would probably assume that it was some sort of hacking tool not a FRAPS-like application. I know that I like making app names with acronyms in them... it's probably more fun than creating the actual program! However, sometimes it's easier to understand a program if the name is more explicit.

FRAPS has it a bit easier since the name has become a bit synonymous with game recording (at least in the nerdier circles). I mean... how often do you hear people use it as a verb?

 

[supermariofan25]

The Download link isn't working anymore :/

 

[Syrome]

Looks pretty slick I must say. Keep working on it and hopefully everything will come together nicely for you.