Microsoft releases their PIX DirectX 12 performance tuning tool for Windows

Microsoft releases their PIX DirectX 12 performance tuning tool for Windows

| Source: Microsoft Author: Mark Campbell

Microsoft releases their PIX DirectX 12 performance tuning tool for Windows

For those outside of game development, Microsoft PIX is a relatively unknown tool, spanning from the release original Xbox until today. PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for DirectX code, which previously was only available for tuning Xbox titles, leaving Windows PC developers in the dark despite their use of the DirectX API.

Now Microsoft has now released a new version of their PIX DirectX optimisation tool for Windows and DirectX 12, finally opening up this tool to developers outside of the Xbox ecosystem. This tool will support the capture of information from D3D12 content from 64-bit UWP and Win32 applications, though at this time it only has limited support for multi-GPU setups.

PIX on Windows provides five main modes of operation, all of which should be able to help developers to optimise their games for Windows, though these games will need to use DirectX 12 exclusively and be 64-bit. - 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.

Right now PIX for Windows in Beta, with Microsoft planning to frequently update the app with bug fixes and new features. A roadmap for the development of PIX can be viewed here, which includes multi-GPU support, API summary statistics and the ability to identify common API usage mistakes.

This program has the potential to deliver better-optimised PC games in the future, especially those that are developed on both Xbox and PC.

Hopefully, Microsoft will continue to work and improve the PC gaming ecosystem, as the past year has certainly been transformative for the company, improving UWP with Free-Sync/G-Sync support and fullscreen options as well as creating a dedicated "game mode" for their upcoming Windows 10 Creators update.

You can join the discussion on Microsoft's PIX tuning/optimisation tool for Windows on the OC3D Forums.

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