Today we released PIX-2203.07, which adds support for today’s DirectStorage announcement.

For more on how to get started with DirectStorage, check out our DirectStorage Landing Page. 

PIX and DirectStorage

New features need new tooling support! It’s been a consistent goal for the PIX team to ensure that developers get tooling support for a new feature as soon as possible. We’re proud to announce that we have PIX support for DirectStorage ready on day 1 with this release! 

To enable DirectStorage support in PIX, check the ‘File accesses’ checkbox under File IO in the Timing Capture settings.

Once this has been enabled, you’ll notice additional lanes in the timeline when you view captures. Each new lane corresponds to each DirectStorage queue created by the captured application.

We recommend that you name each of these queues so you can identify and keep track of them; see below for an example.

From each of these lanes, you can see Enqueue requests, Signals and Submits. You will also be able to see how large your batches are, as well as the execution times for each batch. For more on batches, see here

Finally, PIX can also provide detailed views of the threads in your process and help identify stalls, etc in your loading code.

We hope that this first set of PIX features is helpful in getting DirectStorage support up and running smoothly in your engine. If you run into any issues and/or have feature suggestions, we’d love to hear from you!

As always, we look at and respond to every message we get on discord.gg/directx. And every email from when you hit the Send Feedback button at the top right goes straight to us.