PIX 1707.25 – counter rollup, new Dr. PIX experiments, pixel kill reason, and pixtool.exe

Shawn Hargreaves

Today we released PIX 1707.25 beta.

New in this release:

• GPU counter improvements
  • GPU counter values are now accurately rolled up from individual draws to their parent regions
  • Added support for some AMD R5xx GPUs that did not previously work with PIX
  • Improved accuracy of the crop__sol_pct and zrop__sol_pct counters on NVIDIA GPUs
• Dr. PIX
  • Added a “Bandwidth” page (currently only enabled on NVIDIA)
  • Added a “Depth/Stencil” page, which measures the performance impact of forcing early Z
  • Adjusted the “Primitives and Rasterization” page to be more consistent with PIX on Xbox
• Pipeline state improvements
  • Pixel history now displays a pixel kill reason (e.g. failed depth/stencil test)
  • Copy*, Clear*, and ResolveSubresource calls now correctly populate the pipeline state view
  • Better formatting of resource barrier states when multiple flags are or’ed together
• Timing capture improvements
  • Timing capture event list now shows fence and command queue synchronization events
    • Requires a recent Windows 10 Insider build (Fall Creators Update, aka RS3)
  • Added warnings view to timing captures
• Added pixtool.exe – a command line utility for taking and analyzing GPU captures
• PIX now takes advantage of memory manager write watch to improve capture performance
  • Requires Windows 10 build 15063 or greater (Creators Update, aka RS2)
  • This optimization is especially beneficial when capturing titles that persistently map large buffers
• Added an option (in PIX settings) to skip killing the app before opening a GPU capture
• Bugfixes
  • MSAA array textures weren’t appearing correctly in the texture viewer
  • PIX replay was throwing away calls to ID3D12GraphicsCommandList::DiscardResource
  • False positive ClearDepthStencilView warning because optimized clear color values weren’t being captured correctly
  • (and more)

Shawn Hargreaves

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