Optimising your graphics with Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 - Analysing frames with VSGA Visual Studio Graphics Analyser

With the update to Visual Studio with Update 3 there is a new experience for helping you Analyse your Graphics

Once frames are captured, in the Visual Studio Graphic Diagnostic you can analyse their performance.

To do this simply double click on any frame in the diagsession file you can also save the diagsession file in Visual Studio or save the vsglog file in VSGA for later inspections. By just clicking on the Frame# link. This will open the frame in another instance of Visual Studio 2013 named Visual Studio Graphics Analyser (VSGA).

VSGA is a customized VS environment that only contains the necessary components for analysing frames.

The huge benefit of using VSGA is it's lightweight and has a low memory footprint.

More importantly the VSGA  provides within a Visual Studio IDE as is a highly focused environment for analysing frames. You also have access to all the familiar features including..

1. Event List
2. Pixel History
3. Pipeline Stage
4. Objects
5. Event Call Stack
6. Debugging shader code.

You can also configure how VSGA looks so it's easier to distinguish it from your regular VS IDE window by using VIEW->Options page in VSGA.

For example you can simply change the theme as in the screenshot below where the  VSGA window is using the dark theme while Visual Studio is using the light theme.

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