By Louis Bavoil | June 21, 2019 Tags: DX11 , DX12 , GameWorks , HBAO+ , Nsight Graphics , Nsight Visual Studio Edition , OpenGL Figuring out how to reduce the GPU frame time of a rendering application on PC is challenging for even the most experienced PC game developers. In this blog post, we describe a performance triage method we’ve been using internally at NVIDIA to let us figure out the main performance limiters of any given GPU workload (also known as perf marker or call range), using NVIDIA-specific hardware metrics. Our performance triage method does not start from assumptions or knowledge about what is being rendered on the GPU. Instead, it starts solely from hardware metrics, letting us know how well the whole GPU is utilized, what hardware units and sub-units are limiting the performance, and how close they are running to their respective maximum throughputs (also known as “Speed Of Light” or ”SOL”). Assuming that the application does not us