Microsoft have just released a beta version of PIX, a performance tuning and debugging tool aimed at game developers. Previously only available on XBox consoles, PIX is now available for Windows machines for games running Direct X 12.
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.
For best results we recommend 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. 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.
The beta is free and is available for download here.