Check out Tracy[1]. If you run it as root, it provides a lot of "extra" information, such as when your threads get moved between CPUs. Actually, I saw this post and thought "why should I bother when I already have Tracy?" If anyone has an answer to that, I'm curious to know (:
Tracy is still a frame-based profiler, though.
If you want general system-wide profiling more focused on throughput rather than latency, then I've had a good experience generating flame graphs[2] using plain Linux perf.
[1] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
[2] https://www.brendangregg.com/FlameGraphs/cpuflamegraphs.html
In Optick: C++ Profiler for Gameswolfpld
tracy
C++2019–2026
wolfpld / tracy
tracy
Frame profiler
29Distinct people
37Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
17.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Frame profiler
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
For C++ applications, nothing beats Tracy’s flame graphs in value per dollar. We are using it at Adobe with great effect. It can handle mutex lock contention, runtime values…
MontagFTB used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Tracy Profiler
A real time, nanosecond resolution, remote telemetry, hybrid frame and sampling profiler for games and other applications.
Tracy supports profiling CPU (Direct support is provided for C, C++, Lua, Python and Fortran integration. At the same time, third-party bindings to many other languages exist on the internet, such as Rust, Zig, C#, OCaml, Odin, etc.), GPU (All major graphics/compute APIs: OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D 11/12, Metal, OpenCL, CUDA, WebGPU.), memory allocations, locks, context switches, automatically attribute screenshots to captured frames, and much more.
Documentation for usage and build process instructions
Releases containing the documentation (tracy.pdf) and compiled Windows x64 binaries (Tracy-<version>.7z) as assets
Changelog
Interactive demo
An Introduction to Tracy Profiler in C++ - Marcos Slomp - CppCon 2023
Introduction to Tracy Profiler v0.2
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.3
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.4
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.5
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.6
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.7
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.8
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
4 sourcesA great option for profiling Vulkan code is Tracy, which is a free and open source profiler:
https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
It supports profiling multiple Vulkan queues using VK_EXT_debug_utils timestamps.
In Show HN: VKtracer – vendor-neutral and cross-platform GPU profiler for VulkanMy point isn't that you can't make them work for non-trivial cases, after all as long as you can draw something on screen you can do pretty much anything. The point is how well that is done.
For example from a quick look at the code it looks like this project needs to draw in a bunch of unrelated to each other libraries just to get some basic GUI functionality you'd find even in toolkits from the 80s provide (e.g. drawing text or using file dialogs).
And check these sources [0] and [1], this is doing at least as much bookkeeping as in a "retained" GUI toolkit - except it also has to do things that such a toolkit would do automatically, like explicitly drawing the widgets [2]. People at the past were complaining how tools like Visual Basic were mixing presentation and logic, yet the worst you could do in these tools is to have the logic in
Read the rest
event handlers (...which if you think a bit about it at least that does make a bit of sense), yet here is actual application logic being part of the drawing code in [3] (this is inside a method View::DrawPlayback, scroll a bit upwards to find it).
Now sure, someone might say that this isn't the best example of immediate GUIs... but this is the one that was brought up as a good example. And TBH all it convinced me is that if (for some reason) i had to use ImGui (the library), to spend some time building a retained GUI wrapper around it :-P.
[0] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/blob/master/server/TracySou...
[1] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/blob/master/server/TracyVie...
[2] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/blob/d8c1dae9e120c27801e762...
[3] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/blob/d8c1dae9e120c27801e762...
I think when you look at projects like Tracy, there's no question that immediate mode UIs also work well for non-trivial use cases:
https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
In The complexity that lives in the GUI