Introducing PIX on Windows (beta)

Shawn

January 17th, 2017

Welcome to our new PIX team blog!

PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for game developers. It has a long and storied history spanning three generations of Xbox console. Today we are pleased to announce that a beta release of PIX is now available for analyzing DirectX 12 games on Windows as well.

PIX on Windows provides five main modes of operation:

GPU captures for debugging and analyzing the performance of Direct3D 12 graphics rendering.

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.

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.

accumulate information about how long each function runs for and how often each is called. Callgraph captures trace the execution of a single function.

trace the execution of a single function. Memory Allocation captures provide insight into the memory allocations made by your game.

For best results we recommend running PIX on:

Windows 10 build 14393 ( Anniversary Update , aka RS1) with latest updates

, aka RS1) with latest updates 32 GB RAM

A Direct3D 12 GPU with the latest available graphics drivers. PIX will not work correctly with older drivers! AMD driver >= 21.19.411.0 (17.1.1) Intel driver >= 15.45.10.4542 NVIDIA 970 or better with driver >= 21.21.13.7290. Note that NVIDIA’s support for GPU shader instruction disassembly requires a DLL. Please use this link to get the DLL.



See the requirements page for more information.

This is a beta release, which means bugs are probable and there are plenty of features we want to add but haven’t yet gotten around to. If you encounter a problem, or have a suggestion for how PIX could be improved, we’d love to hear from you. And stay tuned for GPU hardware counters, which will provide richer low level performance information when enabled via per-GPU plugins. The first of these is coming Real Soon Now…

To learn how to use PIX, check out the documentation and video channel. Last but not least, download the PIX beta here.

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