Microsoft releases PIX game debugging tool for Windows

Microsoft PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for Xbox game developers and it has been available for almost three generations of Xbox. Microsoft yesterday released a beta version of PIX for Windows. PIX for Windows will help developers in analyzing DirectX 12 games on Windows.

PIX on Windows provides five main modes of operation:

• GPU captures for debugging and analyzing the performance of Direct3D 12 graphics rendering.
• Timing captures for understanding the performance and threading of all CPU and GPU work carried out by your game.
• Function Summary captures accumulate information about how long each function runs for and how often each is called.
• Callgraph captures trace the execution of a single function.
• Memory Allocation captures provide insight into the memory allocations made by your game.

Microsoft recommends running PIX on Windows 10 build 14393 (Anniversary Update, aka RS1) with latest updates, 32 GB RAM, a Direct3D 12 GPU with the latest available graphics drivers.

Check out the documentation and video channel for more info. And you can download the PIX beta here.