Today we released PIX-1803.16-raytracing which adds experimental support for DirectX Raytracing (DXR).

As just announced at GDC this morning, Microsoft is adding support for hardware accelerated raytracing to DirectX 12 and with this release PIX on Windows supports DXR rendering so you can start experimenting with this exciting new feature right away. Please follow the setup guidelines in the documentation for how to get started.

PIX on Windows supports capturing and analyzing frames rendered using DXR, so you can start debugging and improving your raytracing code. DXR support is seamlessly integrated with the features of PIX on Windows you already know and use for your D3D12 titles. Specifically, PIX allows you to inspect the following properties of your raytracing rendering:

• The Events view shows new API calls for DXR such as DispatchRays and BuildRaytracingAccelerationStructure.
• The Event Details view provides additional insight into each of the DXR API calls.
• The Pipeline view shows the resources used for raytracing such as buffers and textures as well as visualization of acceleration structures.
• The API Object view shows DXR API state objects to help you understand the setup of your raytracing.

Raytracing is an upcoming Windows 10 feature and a new paradigm for both DirectX and PIX on Windows and consequently we plan to evolve PIX on Windows significantly in this area based on input from developers. Please see the documentation for details on limitations of this initial release and use the feedback option to tell us about your experience with using PIX on Windows with your raytracing code.

Please note: This is an experimental release dedicated to support the upcoming DXR features in DirectX 12. We recommend using the latest regular release for non-DXR related work.

Inspecting DirectX Raytracing rendering in PIX on Windows