CLI-Anything/renderdoc/agent-harness/RENDERDOC.md

RENDERDOC.md – Software-Specific SOP

About RenderDoc

RenderDoc is a free, open-source GPU frame capture and analysis tool for Vulkan, D3D11, D3D12, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES. It captures a single frame of GPU commands and allows detailed inspection of every draw call, resource, shader, and pipeline state.

Key Concepts

Capture File (.rdc)

A binary file containing all GPU state and commands for a single frame. Contains embedded sections (textures, shaders, structured data, thumbnails).

Actions

GPU operations recorded in the capture. Hierarchical tree structure:

• PushMarker / PopMarker: Debug groups (like RenderPass: ForwardOpaque)
• Drawcall: Actual draw calls with triangle/vertex counts
• Clear: Clear render target/depth
• Dispatch: Compute shader dispatch
• Copy/Resolve: Resource copy operations
• Present: Frame present

Resources

GPU resources tracked by unique ResourceId:

• Textures: 2D, 3D, cube, array textures with mips
• Buffers: Vertex, index, constant, structured buffers
• Shaders: Compiled shader programs

Pipeline State

At any event, the complete GPU pipeline is inspectable:

• Bound shaders (VS, HS, DS, GS, PS, CS)
• Vertex inputs (attribute layout)
• Render targets and depth target
• Viewports and scissors
• Blend, depth/stencil, rasterizer state
• Shader resources (textures, buffers, samplers)
• Constant buffer contents

Replay

Captures can be replayed on the local GPU. The ReplayController allows:

• Setting the current event (seeking to any draw call)
• Reading back textures, buffers, mesh data
• Picking pixels
• Fetching GPU counters
• Disassembling shaders

CLI Coverage Map

RenderDoc Feature	CLI Command	Status
Open/close capture	capture info	✅ Done
Capture metadata	capture info	✅ Done
List sections	capture info	✅ Done
Extract thumbnail	capture thumb	✅ Done
Convert capture	capture convert	✅ Done
List all actions	actions list	✅ Done
Action summary	actions summary	✅ Done
Find actions by name	actions find	✅ Done
Get single action	actions get	✅ Done
Filter draw calls only	actions list --draws-only	✅ Done
List textures	textures list	✅ Done
Get texture details	textures get	✅ Done
Save texture to file	textures save	✅ Done
Save render target outputs	textures save-outputs	✅ Done
Pick pixel value	textures pick	✅ Done
Pipeline state	pipeline state	✅ Done
Shader disassembly	pipeline shader-export	✅ Done
Constant buffer contents	pipeline cbuffer	✅ Done
Pipeline diff	pipeline diff	✅ Done
List resources	resources list	✅ Done
List buffers	resources buffers	✅ Done
Read buffer data	resources read-buffer	✅ Done
Vertex inputs	mesh inputs	✅ Done
Post-VS outputs	mesh outputs	✅ Done
GPU counters list	counters list	✅ Done
Fetch counter results	counters fetch	✅ Done
Remote capture	—	❌ Future
Shader debugging	—	❌ Future
Resource diff	—	❌ Future