Microsoft has released a new update for its PIX tool that will help developers better optimize their titles. In case you didn’t know, PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for game developers, and its latest beta version lets developers analyze the performance of DirectX 12 games.

PIX supports both UWP and Win32 games, can debug and analyze the performance of Direct3D 12 graphics rendering, offers captures to the developers for undestanding the performance and threading of all CPU and GPU work carried out by their game, and provides insight into the memory allocations made by their game.

This new update for PIX introduces a system monitor that displays real-time counter data while a game is running. This system monitor displays statistics like fps, frame duration, and sync interval, as well as the GPU memory usage.

Moreover, this new patch for PIX improves callstack resolution performance when opening timing captures, fixes crashes caused by HLSL syntax highlighting, and comes with a more robust pixel history.

Here is the complete changelog for PIX’s latest update:

System Monitor displays realtime counter data while a game is running Present statistics (fps, frame duration, sync interval) GPU memory usage (commitment, budget, demotions) Custom title counters reported by the WinPixEventRuntime PIXReportCounter API

Continuous timing captures Record timing data into a circular buffer (rather than just capturing a fixed duration), then use the System Monitor graph view to select a time region of interest and open that as a timing capture

Timing capture event list can now be ordered by either CPU or GPU execution time

Timing capture GPU timeline uses flame graphs to display nested marker regions

More robust pixel history (many bugfixes)

Fixed crashes caused by HLSL syntax highlighting

Improved callstack resolution performance when opening timing captures

Support for Function Summary, Callgraph, Memory and File IO captures of packaged titles