Steven Pratschner

Program Manager, PIX on Windows

I'm the Program Manager for the PIX CPU tools in the Gaming Division at Microsoft. PIX helps you identify the performance issues that may be affecting the frame rate of your DX12 AAA title on Windows and on Xbox.

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Circular Timing Captures

January 3rd, 2024
Starting with the 2402.07 version of PIX on Windows and version 1.0.231030001 of the WinPIXEventRuntime, Timing Captures can now be run in a new "Circular", or "ring-buffer" mode, in addition to the previously available "Sequential" mode.  The new Circular mode is available both through the PIX UI and programmatically using the ...

Saving and Loading PIX Settings

November 14th, 2023
The Settings layout, accessible from the PIX Home tab, provides several controls for configuring various aspects of the PIX user interface and capturing experience.  These settings, along with Timing Capture Timeline configurations, Metrics view configurations, and Metrics View Consolidated Event Patterns can be exported from PIX and saved ...

Defining custom regular expressions for consolidated events in the Timing Capture Metrics view

November 2nd, 2023
The consolidated events feature in the Timing Capture Metrics view is used to group, or consolidate, PIX events that follow a common pattern into a single event for purposes of graphing in the Metrics View.  A common use of this feature is to group events such as "Frame 1", "Frame 2", "Frame 3" and so on into a single event.  Prior to the ...

Timing Capture Statistical Comparison Features

November 1st, 2023
Starting with the 2310.30 version of PIX on Windows, the Timing Capture Metrics view can produce a statistical comparision of the average duration for the points that represent PIX event hierarchies in two selected ranges of time.  Statistical comparisions help determine which portions of the event hierarchies had statistically different ...

Programmatic Timing Captures now available

March 20th, 2023
As described in Programmatic Captures, the PIXBeginCapture and PIXEndCapture can now be used to start and stop Timing Captures from code running in your title.  Programmatic Timing Captures are available starting with the 2303.02 release of PIX on Windows and version 1.0.230302001 of the WinPIXEventRuntime. Timing captures use several ETW ...

Memory profiling support for allocations made from a title’s custom allocator

March 13th, 2023
Starting with the 2303.02 release of PIX on Windows, PIX timing captures can track memory allocations and frees made by your custom memory allocators. By calling the new APIs, PIXRecordMemoryAllocationEvent and PIXRecordMemoryFreeEvent, you provide PIX with the data it needs to display information about all memory allocations and frees made...

Using performance budgets in the Timing Capture metrics view

August 8th, 2022
The 2208.10 release of PX on Windows adds the ability to specify performance budgets in the Timing Capture metrics view. Performance budgets make it easy to quickly find points in the graph that are over their budget. Performance budgets can be specified for any metric. Budgets are often assigned for a variety of scenarios, including ...

Timing Capture Metrics View improvements in PIX 2203.30

April 14th, 2022
The 2203.30 version of PIX on Windows contains two new features in the Timing Capture Metrics View.  We added both of these features based on your feedback.  The first new feature is the ability to graph a PIX CPU events execution time and stalled time, in addition to its duration.  The second feature is an enhancement to the consolidated ...

Graphing Consolidated Events in the Timing Capture Metrics View

January 4th, 2022
The 2201.24 release of PIX on Windows includes a feature that treats a set of events that follow a common naming pattern as the same event in the Timing Capture Metrics view.  You'll find this feature useful if you follow the common practice of naming the PIX events that represent a frame of CPU work (or any other repeated set of work) with a...

Critical path analysis in Timing Captures

December 14th, 2021
The 2201.24 version of PIX on Windows includes a new feature that uses the CPU context switch data collected during a Timing Capture to compute the critical path for a selected PIX event. The critical path is the series of events and thread dependencies that, if shortened, would reduce the overall duration of the selected event. As an ...