Thanks to its main modes, PIX can debug and analyze the performance of Direct3D 12 graphics rendering, offer captures to the developers for undestanding the performance and threading of all CPU and GPU work carried out by their game, and provide insight into the memory allocations made by their game.
You should also be mindful of the following notes before using the software.
PIX only supports capturing D3D12 content, not D3D11 or 11on12.
PIX only supports 64-bit apps (both UWP and Win32). PIX does not support x86 apps.
PIX only captures data from the specific process that it launched or attached to. It does not support child processes. If your title uses multiple processes, you will need to bypass any client/launcher processes and have PIX launch/attach the main game executable.
Counter values other than timing in the event list are not currently rolled up to their parent bundle or marker region.
GPU captures are not generally portable between different GPUs or even different drivers on the same GPU. PIX will warn if you attempt to run analysis on a capture whose capture device differs from the current playback device. You can continue past this warning, but be aware there may be compatibility issues that cause it to fail.
GPU captures do not currently overlap GPU work on different queues. If your app uses asynchronous compute to execute rendering and compute work simultaneously, it will show up in the timeline as being executed in a non-parallel fashion.
PIX does not support multi-GPU enabled apps. You can use it on a machine with multiple GPUs, but PIX will always capture/playback on the primary adapter.
I don't think a single title has been released that was built fundamentally on DX12 yet. A lot of titles have gotten partial support, but the development cycle for most AAA games are so long that everything that has been released so far was already a year or two into development before DX12 was finalized.
PIX is far from finished: we have a long list of things we'd like to improve and add. This list is both incomplete and uncommitted, so no guarantee that we'll actually ever do all these! But we wanted to share it anyway, to give you some idea of where we are likely to go next, and to get your feedback about priorities and what we are missing.
GPU hardware counters to give richer low level performance information.
Dr. PIX experiments provide "what-if" scenario analysis and GPU optimization advice.
Roll up event list counter values to their parent bundle or marker region.
Graph counter values along the GPU timeline.
Warnings to identify common performance problems and API usage mistakes.
Shader edit & continue (change a shader directly inside PIX, and immediately see how the rendering output and performance changes as a result).
Realtime system monitor displays counters such as framerate, CPU and GPU utilization, memory usage, video memory paging activity, disk and network usage, etc.
Tools to help with debugging GPU hangs (aka. TDR).
Tools to better understand video memory usage and paging.
Tools to artificially simulate running on a GPU with less video memory, TDR, and display changes such as monitor add/remove.
Timing captures should show GPU signals/fences and CPU thread names.
Better support for the 'bindless' GPU resource access model (displaying what resources are used even when a shader selects them dynamically from an unbounded descriptor heap).
Rendertarget visualizers such as wireframe and overdraw modes.
API summary statistics (how many draw calls, resource barriers, etc.)
View individual sample values within MSAA surfaces.
Support multiple GPUs (PIX currently always just runs analysis on the primary GPU).
Support launcher processes (where the entrypoint process launches another, and it's the second one that PIX ought to capture from).
File IO captures for helping you optimize your title's reads and writes and for identifying inefficiencies in your packaging strategy.
Support for optionally collect Performance Monitoring Counters in Function Summary and Callgraph captures.
Assembly level instruction tracing to help you identify candidates for micro-optimizations within a function.
At first I read that title as: Microsoft introduces tool that paralyzes the performance of DX12 games.
And I wondered, gee did they allready release the win10 game mode???
Jokes aside more programs for testing graphics api:s is a good thing
Which really upsets me because Crossfire and SLI have been a technology for YEARS and it's something that plenty of people would like to use (including myself) but no one wants to program for it. Seriously.
Which really upsets me because Crossfire and SLI have been a technology for YEARS and it's something that plenty of people would like to use (including myself) but no one wants to program for it. Seriously.
Probably just another way to force ppl to upgrade. Otherwise i can get another fury nano on the cheap and be good for atleast 2yrs.now amd n nvidia can just blame devs and hold no responsibility.
So, this tool penalizes AMD's cards for having better async compute by inducing devs to skip it to take advantage of the tool?
Quote:
Originally Posted by motoray
Probably just another way to force ppl to upgrade. Otherwise i can get another fury nano on the cheap and be good for atleast 2yrs.now amd n nvidia can just blame devs and hold no responsibility.
I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing to leave out support for what are essentially non-critical features early on as a bad thing either (As long as they do actually work on them later of course).
That's my take as an average consumer anyway, I don't know anything about game development and therefore have no idea how useful this tool will actually be, but at face value it sounds like a good thing that Microsoft is providing tools like this.
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