Capturing and analysing your Graphics with Visual Studio 2013 Graphics Diagnostic tools now available in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 and DXCap.exe

Command line tool for capturing and playing back frames

As game developers were looking a providing the best experience across all our devices and many of you want to get results from devices which do not have Visual Studio installed.

To enable this we are  now shipping a command line tool called DXcap which is a great tool for  capturing and playback which is included in the Windows SDK.

If your a Visual Studio user Windows SDK comes with Visual Studio.

You can use this tool to capture frames from desktop apps, store apps, and phone apps.

Once you installed Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 RC (Download) or standalone Windows SDK (Download). You can find dxcap.exe in C:\Windows\System32 and C:\Windows\SysWOW64. Simply pass in -c and the name of the exe to capture and –p to playback the most recent captured log.

A quick example:

DXCap.exe is a command-line tool for graphics diagnostics capture and playback. It supports Direct3D 10 through Direct3D 11.2 across all feature levels.

 DXCap.exe [-file filename] [-frame frames | -period periods | -manual] -c app [args...]
DXCap.exe -p [filename] [-debug | -warp | -hw] [-config] [-rawmode]
DXCap.exe –p [filename] –screenshot [-frame frames]
DXCap.exe –p [filename] –toXML [xml_filename]
DXCap.exe –v [–file filename] [-examine events] [-haltonfail | -exitonfail] [-showprogress]
DXCap.exe -e [search_string]
DXCap.exe -info

So to capture frame 100 from a desktop app: dxcap.exe –frame 100 -c "C:\TestProjects\MyApp.exe"

To playback: dxcap.exe -p

You can find details in DXCap's help information (Dxcap /?) or MSDN document Command-Line Capture Tool .

Using Visual Studio 2013 – simply Configure capture options in TOOLS->Options->Graphics Diagnostics

We are now exposing a number of options for capture which you can find by opening TOOLS->Options->Graphics Diagnostics page in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3.