At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) today in San Francisco, Intel released Intel GPA 2012, the latest suite of tools for game and media app developers to optimize performance. The new software is now available for smartphones, tablets, and ultrabook app developers, and will be able to support Android devices later this year.

Intel Corporation today introduced Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel GPA) 2012, the latest version of a powerful tool suite to optimize performance of gaming, media and entertainment applications. Expanding upon Intel’s mobile momentum, Intel GPA 2012 will support mobile applications for ultrabook devices and Android based smartphones and tablets for the first time.

Previously available only on PC platforms, Intel GPA helps developers improve the experience of game and media applications by accessing powerful tools to analyze and optimize performance on Intel Core and Intel Atom processor-based platforms. The tool suite enables developers to enhance application performance on smartphones, tablets, Ultrabooks and PCs. Developers can also optimize Web content for browsers that support hardware-accelerated rich media, including Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

“Gaming is one of the largest consumer segments for smartphones, but nobody wants a game that drains a smartphone battery,” said Craig Hurst, Intel’s director of Visual Computing Product Management. “There are few choices for developers who want to optimize apps for power, so Intel GPA 2012 introduces power metrics, ensuring that a game not only has great performance, but also runs longer on Ultrabooks, Android tablets and smartphones.”

The Intel GPA tool suite includes:

Intel GPA System Analyzer – Analyzes game performance and identifies potential bottlenecks that slow down performance or affect graphics. This tool allows developers to perform optimization experiments to fine-tune performance without changing application code. New in Intel GPA 2012, Intel GPA System Analyzer now supports a standalone mode that enables real-time analysis of application performance on smartphones, tablets and Ultrabooks, including Android devices. Intel GPA System Analyzer can be used to analyze an application’s power usage and how it will affect battery life on mobile devices.

Intel GPA Frame Analyzer – Offers application developers deep frame analysis of individual application elements such as shaders, textures and pixel history. Intel GPA Frame Analyzer shows the visual and performance impact of each individual element in real time without affecting the application source code.

Intel GPA Platform Analyzer – Developers can visualize performance of application tasks and the effect on devices by viewing CPU metrics and graphics workloads. PC application developers can also see how their software would perform in a multi-core environment. Intel GPA Platform Analyzer has been rebuilt from the ground up for the release of Intel GPA 2012 to provide more system behavior information. Additionally, the tool is capable of handling large volumes of data to emulate application performance on an extended run.

Intel GPA Media Analyzer – When used in conjunction with Intel Media SDK, Media Analyzer enables developers to see how effectively an application uses hardware-accelerated video encode and decode in real-time.

Intel GPA 2012 is available as a free download at www.intel.com/software/gpa. Support for Android devices is expected to be publically released this year.