PIX for Windows: Microsoft releases its biggest update to GPU captures since 2017

Microsoft PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for Xbox game developers and it has been available for three generations of Xbox. Back in 2017, Microsoft announced PIX for Windows. PIX for Windows helps developers in analyzing DirectX 12 games on Windows. Microsoft recently released a major update for PIX for Windows that improves GPU captures.

Microsoft mentioned that this is the biggest update to GPU captures since 2017. Capture-time framerates are much higher than in previous versions. According to internal benchmarks, the framerate improvements are between 3X to 57X at capture time. Other improvements included in this update are listed below.

Broader Application Compatability

This release enables GPU captures of some previously unsupported scenarios, including:

• Support for Hololens 2 applications that would deadlock with previous builds of PIX.
• Support for applications that would deadlock on hybrid devices with previous builds of PIX.
• Support for applications that use D3D12 video APIs.
• All known issues capturing D3D11 applications through D3D11on12 have been resolved.
• Improved support for placed/tiled resources.
• DRED is now fully supported in applications running under GPU Capture.
• We correctly capture/replay applications that use placed upload resources.
• We correctly serialize view instancing information in PSO streams.
• We correctly capture raytracing acceleration structures created in one capture and used in a later capture.

Improvements while taking captures

We’ve made improvements to the experience taking GPU Captures:

• You can open and analyze newly-taken GPU Captures without closing your game/application. This is now turned on by default, and all issues with the previous setting to enable this have been resolved.
• Each .wpix file now contains exactly 1 GPU Capture. This matches Xbox PIX, and removes some confusing user experiences.

Video Support

You are now able to take captures of applications that use D3D12 video APIs. You can also capture D3D11 video work using the “Force D3D11on12” .  Look out for a blog post next week that details this new ability.

You can learn more about this update from the source link below.

Source: Microsoft