PIX 1709.18.004 – Dr. PIX bandwidth on AMD and Intel, access tracking for bindless resources, more performance warnings, and pixtool save-resource

Shawn Hargreaves

Today we released PIX 1709.18.004 beta and an updated WinPixEventRuntime (version 1.0.170918004).

New in this release:

• Dr. PIX  “Bandwidth” page is now enabled on AMD and Intel
• Access tracking for bindless resources
  • PIX now instruments shaders so it knows exactly what data was read or written via dynamic indexing
  • This makes the Pipeline view far more useful for titles that use bindless resource access model
  • By default, it now lists only resources that were accessed during the selected event (you can still see all bound resources by clicking the gear icon in the Pipeline view and selecting Show all resources)
  • In future releases, we will also use this data to improve resource history and warnings analysis
• Added more performance warnings
  • Thanks to our partners at NVIDIA and AMD for their help identifying and testing these!
  • Unused root parameters
  • Redundant Set*RootSignature calls
  • No Resource Heap Tier 2 usage (if capture device supported Tier 2)
  • Device removal (TDR) at capture
  • Device removal (TDR) during analysis
  • Shader attempted to access out-of-bounds register index
  • Descriptor table recommendations (e.g. split parameter up into smaller ranges)
  • Recommendations to have more-specialized root signatures
  • Descriptor duplication detected
  • SRVs that may perform better as CBVs on NVIDIA
  • Root sig v1.1 flag usage recommendations
  • Structured buffer size recommendations
  • Large total number of descriptors detected
  • Potential clear color optimizations
  • Potentially slow depth/stencil copies on NVIDIA
• Added save-resource command to pixtool.exe
  • Many thanks to the PIX team interns, Jacob Shiohira, Osvaldo Armas, and Rebecca Chen, for their work on pixtool this summer!
• Timing captures and GPU captures now include an option to draw all child nodes in the timeline on top of the parent node rather than in a hierarchy underneath the parent.
• PIX now remembers the most recently selected UWP, to streamline the workflow of repeatedly capturing from the same app
• Many bugfixes

Shawn Hargreaves

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