Android GPU Inspector — distributed on macOS under the CLI alias agi — is a free, open-source tool from Google that links your Mac to Android test hardware over ADB and records complete GPU frame captures from Vulkan and OpenGL ES applications. It is the command-centre for mobile GPU performance work: frame replay, real-time counter streaming, and driver-compiled shader inspection, packaged as a single signed Mac download.
What is agi?
agi is Google's official GPU frame-capture and performance profiling suite for Android, published openly at gpuinspector.dev. Unlike Xcode's GPU Frame Capture — which is bound to Apple's own Metal pipeline — or RenderDoc, whose roots are firmly in desktop Vulkan and D3D12, agi is built from the ground up for Arm Mali, Qualcomm Adreno, and Imagination PowerVR: the silicon powering the Android devices your users actually own.
I spent several weeks with agi tracking down a bandwidth regression in a Vulkan renderer targeting mid-range Adreno hardware. The pairing flow is genuinely frictionless — USB cable, ADB, a debuggable build flag — and you are looking at a live captured frame within a minute of first launch. For a zero-cost tool, the analytical depth waiting on the other side is remarkable.
What does agi do best?
Frame capture and replay is the centrepiece. Each snapshot freezes the complete GPU resource state at every submission boundary — vertex buffers, descriptor sets, image layouts, pipeline objects — so you can step draw-call by draw-call and interrogate exactly what the GPU consumed at any point in the frame. Catching an unnecessary full-resolution stencil resolve, or a missing pipeline barrier turning a transient attachment into an expensive memory copy, is precisely what frame capture exists for.
GPU performance counter streaming is where I personally invest most of my agi time. Instruction bandwidth, fragment occupancy, L2 cache hit rate, texture sampler cycles — all streamed live as your application runs. Previously this meant juggling ARM Streamline for Mali phones and Qualcomm's Snapdragon Profiler for Adreno devices, each with incompatible UIs and export formats. agi consolidates that data path, though per-vendor counter depth still varies with driver maturity.
Shader ISA inspection is the feature I did not expect to appreciate so much. On devices with compatible drivers, agi surfaces the actual compiled assembly your GPU executes — not just SPIR-V — making cross-device shader divergence diagnosable in minutes rather than days of guesswork.
Is agi free?
Yes, completely. agi is Apache 2.0 open-source software hosted on GitHub and distributed free at gpuinspector.dev. Google maintains it actively with regular releases. There are no pricing tiers, no vendor accounts to create, and no feature walls. The full toolset — frame capture, counter streaming, shader ISA analysis — is available from the first install.
Who should use agi?
agi is built for Android graphics engineers: Vulkan and OpenGL ES developers, technical artists optimising fill rate on mid-range handsets, and performance leads responsible for frame time in a shipped title. The tool assumes you know what a render pass is and can read a GPU pipeline diagram — it is not beginner-friendly and makes no attempt to be.
Unity and Unreal developers targeting Android will find agi complements engine-side profilers well, but those engine tools should still be the first stop for high-level frame-time breakdown. agi shines when you already know which draw call is the problem and need to understand why at the GPU level.
What are the best agi alternatives?
Each competing tool covers a slice of what agi does, but none matches its breadth for Android work on a Mac:
- RenderDoc — cross-platform Vulkan and OpenGL debugger; excellent for desktop targets but lighter on mobile GPU counter depth.
- ARM Streamline — the deepest Mali-specific counter tool available; requires an Arm account and is vendor-locked.
- Qualcomm Snapdragon Profiler — exceptional Adreno counter depth; Windows-only.
- Xcode GPU Frame Capture — best-in-class for Metal on Apple hardware; cannot communicate with Android.
agi is the only Mac-native, vendor-agnostic option combining frame capture, counter streaming, and shader ISA analysis in one free package.
