[zparrish]

I don't know if there's already a way to do this (or if its even possible once voxelization is complete), but in case it doesn't exist, it would be really nice to have a debug mode for Maxwell that stores information about how much computational power various parts of the scene consume either by percentage or time with appropriate levels of granularity (i.e. milliseconds or even microseconds). Ideally, it should be broken down into at least 2 lists; one by object and one by material (including the environment shaders like IBL and Physical Sun/Sky). That way, if you have a scene that seems to be taking a really long time to render, you get some idea of where the bottlenecks are. I'm listing this as a "debug mode" since it will inevitably lower the overall performance of the render and should not be used during production. You would probably have enough data after SL 4 (or even lower) to get an accurate representation.

Perhaps it would be easier to create a render channel that shows which pixels (or even voxels) are harder to render than others. That would at least start the troubleshooting process. It might get trickier if the faulting entity is out of frame though with this approach.

The only closest comparison that I personally know of would be generating Cache Grind files to record the performance of PHP on a web server. The cache grind file stores information on the number of function calls by function, as well as the execution time of each function in aggregate. It's saved my Web Developer life a few times when I had no idea if the bottleneck was tied to hardware, networking, the OS, Apache, MySQL, or PHP directly.

Just a thought. Thanks Next Limit!