Microsoft PIX

Microsoft PIX: Specifically designed for game developers, this Microsoft-signed application enables you to debug and tune DirectX 12 games on your Windows PC

Microsoft PIX is an application designed to provide advanced game performance assessment, debugging, and tuning for game developers.

In game development, resource usage optimization is extremely important and Microsoft PIX can offer valuable information regarding the rendering process and how it affects the host system's performance. With this powerful application, developers can quickly identify issues regarding frame rendering and image synchronization.

The program offers full support for DirectX 12 games and it can connect to either a local or a remote computer to analyze and evaluate a game while it's being played. Microsoft PIX can attach to one of the running processes or target UWP and Win32 processes. It's recommended to have the latest drivers for your GPU installed before using the application to ensure all the features are working as intended.

Microsoft PIX can run in various modes the first being GPU capturing. This mode will evaluate the game's capabilities regarding Direct3D graphics rendering. The Direct3D API calls performed by the game will be recorded and they can be played back during the analysis to compile information which can be useful when debugging.

You can also get real-time information for CPU and GPU usage, while the game is running using timing captures. This way, developers can monitor tasks being distributed to the CPU's cores as well as rendering latencies. The Callgraph mode can be used to target a specific function and see how often it's being called while the Function Summary mode will acquire details regarding the execution time and total number of function calls.

There's also a memory allocation mode which enables you to identify incorrect allocation patterns and potential memory leaks.