PIX on Windows
Performance tuning and debugging for DirectX 12 games on Windows
Latest posts
PIX 1908.02 – Fixes for customer issues, plus DXR and New Timing Capture improvements
Today we released PIX 1908.02, which can be downloaded here. This release fixes miscellaneous bugs that were reported to us by customers. It also adds new CPU features to New Timing Captures, and adds some final touches to the new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) Pipeline View in GPU Captures. Thank you everyone who has reported issues to us. As usual, if you encounter a problem then please use the feedback button in the top-right corner of PIX to contact us. We're very happy to help! Incidentally, this release fixes an issue that prevented the feedback button from working for some users. Please contact us at t...
GPU timing data in New Timing Captures
GPU timing data was added to the New Timing Captures preview feature in the PIX 1906.14 release. This allows developers to view GPU work submission and execution, including async compute. Getting Started The application should be launched with the following GPU timings checkbox checked in the options to enable timing data collection. Command Queues D3D12 command queues created by the application are represented as separate lanes containing colored bars that indicate GPU work. The name of the lane is a combination of D3D12 command queue name, if named by the title and the D3D12 command queue type (ex: DI...
PIX 1906.26 – Minor update fixes PIX on Insider Preview builds of Windows
Today we released PIX 1906.26, available for download here. This release makes PIX compatible with the latest Insider Preview builds of Windows. Highlights
PIX 1906.14 – GPU Timing in New Timing Captures
Today we released PIX 1906.14, available for download here. This release adds GPU timings to the New Timing Capture preview and further improvements to DXIL shader debugging. Highlights GPU Timing Data This release of PIX adds GPU Timing Data to the preview of New Timing Captures. Like with Legacy Timing Captures, GPU Timing data displays GPU work alongside your API calls; in the graph below, each bar represents the Top of Pipe to End of Pipe duration of a GPU operation on the Command Queue: In the future, we plan to add more features currently found in e...
PIX CPU Tools: Finding and Analyzing Context Switches
The information in this post has been updated and replaced with the following documentation page: Finding and Analyzing context switches Steven Pratschner Program Manager - PIX team
PIX CPU Tools: Populating the Range Details view
The most common way to populate the Range Details view in the new implementation of PIX Timing Captures is to drag select a range of time in the Timeline using the mouse. When you complete your selection, Range Details is populated with the data from all Thread and Core lanes for the range of time you selected. After Range Details is populated, single clicking anywhere in the Timeline will not cause Range Details to update, but selecting a different time range will. There are other ways to populate Range Details in addition to selecting time ranges with the mouse. You may find these other modes useful depen...
PIX CPU Tools: Graphing PIXReportCounter values in the Metrics View
The Metrics view in New Timing Captures allows you to graph the duration of PIX CPU events and any counter values that are reported using the PIXReportCounter API. Graphing event durations is fairly discoverable in the UI, but I think it's less well-known that counter values can be graphed as well. Annotating your title with calls to PIXReportCounter and graphing the resulting custom data in the Metrics view can be very helpful when investigating performance outliers. For example, in the following picture, when looking at the frame that is highlighted, it's fairly obvious that the duration of the UpdateEnemy...
PIX CPU Tools Reboot!
A few weeks ago we released a version of PIX that includes a Preview release of a new implementation of Timing Captures. This release represents a significant reboot of our CPU performance tools in PIX. We've gotten a lot of feedback over the last few years about how our CPU tools in PIX compare with other AAA game-focused profiling tools. Developers told us they needed longer capture times, faster capture open speed, better analysis tools and numerous improvements to our UI, among other things. Clearly we had a ways to go. It quickly became apparent to us that the architecture we had in place for Timing...
PIX 1904.23 – New Timing Capture preview and improved DXIL shader debugging
Today we released PIX 1904.23, available for download here. This release contains a preview of the new Timing Capture implementation and improvements to DXIL shader debugging and pixtool as well as various other improvements and bug fixes. Highlights Preview of new Timing Capture implementation This release of PIX includes a Preview version of a new implementation of Timing Captures. This new version is labeled a Preview both because various aspects of the new captures may change based on your feedback, and because the new implementation of Timing Captures does not ...