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How to record a Tracy trace

How to record a Tracy trace

Tracy is a real-time, nanosecond-resolution frame profiler for C++ applications. It is designed to provide detailed performance insights, allowing developers to identify and resolve bottlenecks in their code. The Tracy Client is a GUI application that connects to C++ applications which support Tracy. The Tracy Client can be used to analyze frames, and the Tracy Client can be used to save and load profiled frames to and from a Tracy trace file.

MAK provides a copy of the Tracy Client with every installation of VR-Vantage, VR-Forces, and VR-Engage to allow customers who are experiencing performance issues a way of capturing their performance problems in a Tracy trace file which can be sent to the MAK Support Team for further analysis.

Walkthrough

  1. Open up a MAK product. This walkthrough will use VR-Vantage.

  2. After startup, in the main scene window, press the F2 key twice to bring up the Performance Statistics Overlay.

    An image showing what the Performance Statistics Overlay looks like
    Performance Statistics Overlay

  3. In the Collect Stats section near the bottom of the overlay, check the Tracy checkbox.

  4. Start the Tracy Client application by running the Tracy.exe (Windows) or Tracy-release (Linux) executable in the bin64 folder of the product’s installation directory.

  5. In the Tracy Client application, you should see VR-Vantage (vrvStealth) listed as a discovered client.

    image-20250214-154905.png
    Tracy Client after Startup

  6. Double-click the vrvStealth entry listed under the Discovered Clients section.

  7. The Tracy capture on VR-Vantage has now begun and, as time passes, information about more and more frames rendered by VR-Vantage are being captured.

    1. The number of captured frames should be limited to 1) minimize the size of the saved Tracy trace on disk and 2) capture the specific frames which exhibit the issue(s) that you wish the MAK Support Team to assist with.

  8. To save the Tracy trace to disk, click the image-20250214-155542.png button on the top left. Then click ‘Save trace’.

    1. The Tracy Client will now ask where you would like to save the Tracy trace. After saving, you can send this to the MAK Support Team for analysis.