Simulation / Modeling / Design

NVIDIA announces Nsight Systems 2019.6 and Nsight Graphics 2019.6

The Nsight family of tools includes Nsight Systems, Nsight Graphics and Nsight Compute. The typical workflow for a graphics developer would start with Nsight Systems to analyze and profile at the big picture to avoid picking less efficient optimizations based on assumptions and false-positive indicators. Next, if the issue is CPU dependent they may continue with Nsight Systems, or drill down deeper into the graphics debugging, profiling, and analysis of using Nsight Graphics.

Nsight Graphics 2019.6

Nsight Graphics 2019.6 is now available for download. We have added a number of feature enhancements to improve developer workflows within the tool.

The first enhancement is Custom Layouts. With this feature, you can save and load custom-named layouts so that the interface is better suited to your workflow. To find this new feature, check out the Window section in the menu bar at the top.

Automatic attaching to games that use launchers is easier in Nsight Graphics 2019.6.  We’ve enabled automatic connections to child processes that perform rendering operations and improve feedback during the connection process. These changes should make it much easier to attach to applications that run using launchers, such as Steam or the Epic Games Store.

We’ve also added support for applications that use the NVIDIA NGX SDK.  This deep learning-powered technology allows you to bring advanced AI to your application. For more information about NGX, visit this link: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/ngx.

Nsight Graphics 2019.6 adds new support for 8 Vulkan extensions:

  • VK_EXT_line_rasterization 
  • VK_EXT_headless_surface
  • VK_KHR_create_renderpass2 
  • VK_KHR_external_fence_win32
  • VK_KHR_external_memory_win32
  • VK_KHR_external_semaphore
  • VK_KHR_imageless_framebuffer 
  • VK_NVX_image_view_handle

We’ve made several improvements to the Events View to improve readability.  For example, events can be filtered with both a quick filtering expression as well as a detailed configuration dialog.  We’ve enabled event display to toggle the class interface information. If you use Vulkan, you’ll now be able to see the new debug object names for Vulkan objects.

With GPU Trace, we have added the ability to add your own ranges to annotate the trace. These persist with the trace file and can be used for documenting ranges to look at later. Share the trace with your teammates in order to ask questions or comment on suspect regions of the frame.

Historically, the timeline has been difficult to use for lining up data for analysis. To make this easier, we now allow you to pin rows. When hovering over a row, a pinned button will pop up. If you click this row, it will automatically move to the top of the timeline and will remain anchored when scrolling down the other rows. You can choose more than one row to pin. This information will be saved so when reopening the file, the settings will remain. In the example below, the marker’s row is pinned, allowing you to see markers no matter where you scroll.

GPU Trace shows events according to the queue they were executed on and by default, according to this hierarchy. For better granularity, you can now toggle this view from hierarchy to flat mode. The flat mode can be used when the user needs to remove some of the rows and/or rearrange the order of the rows:

Flat vs. Hierarchy modes:


The Regime Table summarizes the marker data and correlates with the timeline, making it easier to find a regime and understand its metric data. We’ve enhanced this table with a new filtering mechanism, making it an even more powerful tool to help you detect areas of interest:

When debugging DXR or NVIDIA VKRay, the Acceleration Structure Viewer displays the instances that compose the BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy). We’ve improved this by allowing you to select an instance within the viewer and correlate that with the acceleration structure table. Just click on the instance geometry you want to inspect and it will automatically highlight in the table to the left.

For full details, see the release notes.

Nsight Systems 2019.6

NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2019.6 is also available for download. This release expands graphics trace on Windows by adding support for Direct3D 11, WDDM CPU+GPU queues, and OpenGL. The full release details, please visit the systems release article.

Nsight Systems – 2019.6 Direct3D11 Feature Spotlight

Direct3D11 & WDDM trace show key API calls and how work passes through the driver queues to the GPU

OpenGL trace on Windows tracks functions and the batches of GPU workloads produced

Contact us at our forums and visit our product page to download the latest release of Nsight Systems and Nsight Graphics.

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