PIX 2605.28-preview: previewing new PIX and D3D12 features - PIX on Windows

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Austin Kinross

Engineering Manager, PIX

Today we released PIX version 2605.28-preview, which can be downloaded here.

This release complements the new D3D12 Agility SDK that was released today, version 721. This PIX release also includes initial preview versions of a lot of the exciting PIX features that we announced in our GDC session in collaboration with AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. You can read more about those announcements here, and you can watch our session in the GDC vault.

Please try out these new features and let us know your thoughts. The best ways to reach us are via the Send Feedback button in the PIX UI, and via the #pix channel on the DirectX Discord.

Note: we announced DirectX Dump Files at GDC but they are not quite ready for public use yet. Stay tuned for more announcements in early June!

Features in this release include:

Agility SDK 721 Support

Shader Explorer

PIX API

GPU Captures: Tile Mappings Viewer

System Monitor: GPU Hardware Counters

New Remote Deployment Workflows

Timing Captures: New DirectStorage Mapping Files Support

Agility SDK 721 Support

This release includes full capture/replay support for the new D3D features in the preview Agility SDK 720 released today. This includes GUID texture layouts and UAVs of Depth Buffers. For Partial Programs, PIX has full capture/replay support, as well as:

Visualizers (except below)

NURI Dr Pix experiment

Culled Prim Dr PIX experiment

PIX features that don’t currently support partial programs include:

VS and IA output

Visualizers: Overdraw, Depth complexity, VRS, Helper lane, Gold image

Shader Edit and Continue

Shader Access Tracking (i.e. the ability to see dynamically-indexed resources in your shaders)

Shader Debugging

Shader Explorer

Shader Explorer is a new tool (though familiar if you have used Xbox PIX) that enables profiling and iteration of shader development across a variety of hardware targets by utilizing IHV offline shader compilers, the same ones that enable Advanced Shader Delivery.

This preview release includes support for static profiling on AMD and Intel hardware. Static profiling includes features such as ISA to HLSL correlation, register pressure, register lifetimes, and more. By utilizing the IHV offline shader compilers, static profiling can target any supported hardware even if you do not have that hardware available in your machine.

To get started, create a new Shader Explorer project from the File -> New menu by selecting the type of pipeline that you would like to work with (Compute, Graphics, Mesh).

Once your project is open, add shader stages to the pipeline, import or write HLSL, use the Pipeline State view to modify the pipeline state to match your shaders, select a hardware family to target using the vendor and adapter dropdowns, and click Compile. You can use the Revisions panel to manage multiple iterations of your pipeline and compare them.

Future releases will build upon this preview and include features such as:

Exporting your shader pipeline from a GPU capture into Shader Explorer so that you don’t have to manually create or import the shaders and pipeline state

ISA syntax highlighting

ISA register to HLSL variable correlation

Live profiling (instruction sampling, stalls, and more)

Much more! This is just the beginning of Shader Explorer on PC and many more investments in it are in the pipeline

Known Issues for this release:

AMD

ISA to HLSL line mappings are not available for AMD hardware targets

Intel

ISA to HLSL line mappings are not available for Pixel Shaders.

Mesh Pipelines fail to profile due to a driver bug

As always, please get in touch with us with any feedback or suggestions on this exciting new feature.

PIX API

A beta release of the PIX API is now included in this installer. If you are interested in using this, then please contact us for onboarding instructions. We will publicly document this in a future version of PIX.

Tile Mappings Viewer

PIX now supports inspecting tile mappings for reserved resources and heaps. When viewing a reserved resource in the Texture Viewer you’ll have a new Mapping Details panel. Selecting a pixel will also draw an overlay around the selected tile and information about that tile will be displayed in the panel. This includes:

Tile index and coordinate.

If mapped, to which heap and at what offset.

Any other aliased tiles from other reserved resources.

General resource tiling information (like what you’d get from ID3D12Device::GetResourceTiling).

And, if you really need to drill into your tile mappings, you can navigate to the new Resource Mappings and Heap Mappings views which, after selecting a resource or heap and an event, feature:

A pivot table view of the mappings, allowing you to slice the mappings you see in the table by Mapped Object Id, Event Id, or Subresource Index.

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