Adoption of DirectX 12 among the development community has been decidedly slower than what Microsoft would have wanted- so here they are, with another update for their new star API, which makes development using DX12 easier for developers, presumably to spur them into using it while developing games for PC.
Microsoft have now added PIX to Windows 10, which means that developers can now use Microsoft’s debugging and performance tuning tool in analyzing their DirectX 12 games. PIX as a debugging environment is widely praised, so this is a good move on Microsoft’s part regardless.
If you want, you can download PIX for yourself from here. Just remember, it is technically still in open beta. And make sure to keep the following requirements in mind:
- PIX only supports capturing D3D12 content, not D3D11 or 11on12.
- PIX only supports 64-bit apps (both UWP and Win32). PIX does not support x86 apps.
- PIX only captures data from the specific process that it launched or attached to. It does not support child processes. If your title uses multiple processes, you will need to bypass any client/launcher processes and have PIX launch/attach the main game executable.
- Counter values other than timing in the event list are not currently rolled up to their parent bundle or marker region.
- GPU captures are not generally portable between different GPUs or even different drivers on the same GPU. PIX will warn if you attempt to run analysis on a capture whose capture device differs from the current playback device. You can continue past this warning, but be aware there may be compatibility issues that cause it to fail.
- GPU captures do not currently overlap GPU work on different queues. If your app uses asynchronous compute to execute rendering and compute work simultaneously, it will show up in the timeline as being executed in a non-parallel fashion.
- PIX does not support multi-GPU enabled apps. You can use it on a machine with multiple GPUs, but PIX will always capture/playback on the primary adapter.
- PIX only supports PCs with DX12 enabled GPU with the latest drivers, 32GB of system RAM and Windows 10 build 14393 (Anniversary Update, aka RS1) with latest updates
