Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
21.6 Conclusion
NVIDIA Parallel Nsight integrates GPU debugging and profiling capabilities into
Microsoft's Visual Studio to provide a rich, seamless development environment for
writing GPU-centric code. The Graphics Debugger is a fully hardware-accelerated
source-code debugger that fully utilizes the Visual Studio GUI to provide the same
experience when debugging HLSL code on the GPU as you have when debugging
C/C++ on the CPU. The Graphics Inspector exposes the settings inside of the
Direct3D runtime for each draw call, as well as showing the scene as it is constructed
by scrubbing through draw calls and visualizing the data provided to it by your
content pipeline and engine. The Pixel History feature helps answer the question:
“Why is this pixel the color that it is?” giving access to the context that colored a
given fragment.
On the performance side, the Frame Profiler helps you determine exactly where
your bottleneck is, without having to resort to experiments to isolate different GPU
subunits. Finally, the Analyzer allows you to perform a complete system trace and
watch workflows on the CPU kick off calculations on the GPU to see a holistic view
of your application running in a multiprocessor/multicore system.
