Announcing Preview Builds

PIX on Windows has always been dedicated to keeping pace with the official releases of the Agility SDK. However, developers working with the Preview versions of the Agility SDK – which contain D3D12 features that are still in progress – are left without a meaningful graphics debugger. This can be especially frustrating, as these features are often nuanced and difficult to get right.

To address this, we’re excited to announce a series of PIX on Windows Preview releases. These versions of PIX on Windows are designed to work with the latest Preview Agility SDK (v706) and include our initial support for these in-progress features. Though if you are not using the Preview Agility SDK in your game/app, then we encourage you to keep using the non-preview PIX on Windows releases.

This first preview release contains support for all the new features in the Preview SDK, notably:

• Enhanced Barriers
• Independent Front/Back Stencil Refs and Masks
• Triangle Fans

You can find it at the bottom of the Downloads page.

Though it’s important to note that some of these features in PIX on Windows are still in-progress themselves, which means you may experience problems or limitations with our support so far. We are actively working on these features and we plan to release new versions as we finalize support.

If you run into any issues with the current implementation, or if you have suggestions about how they could be better, please reach out and let us know! You can find us at discord.gg/directx. Alternatively, every email from when you hit the Send Feedback button goes straight to the entire PIX on Windows team.

Restrictions in the Preview Build

Since these features in PIX on Windows are all in-progress, we wish to reserve the right to alter the in-progress file layout. As a result, capture files taken with the Preview builds will not be compatible with any other builds of PIX on Windows, including future official releases. To help with this distinction, captures will be saved with the “.wpix_preview” extension.

Additionally, Preview builds will not be included in the search path for WinPixEventRuntime’s function PIXLoadLatestWinPixGpuCapturerLibrary. Users will have to update the function to look in the “Microsoft PIX Preview” folder if they want it to use the Preview build’s version of PIX on Windows.

Known Limitations

• Enhanced Barriers
  • Render Passes or Video work using Enhanced Barriers are not yet supported.
  • PIX’s Warnings Analysis does not yet support Enhanced Barriers.

Using WARP preview binaries with PIX on Windows

The recently announced WARP preview contains support for these features as well! If you are using these WARP binaries in your application and you would like to capture/replay it with PIX, then please place the WARP binary into your PIX installation directory.