NVIDIA Developer Zone

NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition

For compute developers working in Eclipse development environment, please see Nsight Eclipse Edition

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Development Platform, Visual Studio Edition (formerly NVIDIA Parallel Nsight) brings GPU Computing into Microsoft Visual Studio. Build, Debug, Profile and Trace heterogeneous compute and graphics applications using CUDA C/C++, OpenCL, DirectCompute, Direct3D, and OpenGL.

  • Product Features

    List of features of Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition

  • Product Requirements

    Details the hardware and software support of Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition

  • Support and Documentation

    User Guide, Documentation, Forums, and more

  • Videos

    Teaser and Instructional Videos showing Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition in action

  • Webinars

    Past Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Webinars

  • Coming Soon...

    Coming soon to an upcoming version of Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition

Download it now!
For Windows 7 and Vista

If you experience trouble accessing the Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition downloads, please visit the Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Registered Developer Program page for instructions to gain access.


Please visit Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition 2.2 - New Features for a listing of the new features of the 2.2 release.

Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Debugger for GPU Computing
  • Debug your CUDA C/C++ and DirectCompute source code directly on the GPU hardware
  • As the industry's only GPU hardware debugging solution, it drastically increases debugging speed and accuracy
  • Use the familiar Visual Studio Locals, Watches, Memory and Breakpoints windows
  • Custom CUDA info page for navigating massively parallel threads states and contexts
 Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Application and System Trace
  • Trace OS, multi-core CPU, Graphics and Compute APIs, Driver and GPU activities on a single timeline
  • Correlate OpenGL, Direct3D, CUDA and OpenCL activities to the exact CPU code line
  • CUDA profiler with unlimited experiments on live kernels
  • Specialized report pages with API call logs and statistics
Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Graphics Debugger
  • Direct 3D 10 and 11 Frame Debugger with render state and draw call inspection
  • Debug HLSL shaders directly on the GPU hardware. Drastically increasing debugging speed and accuracy over emulated (SW) debugging
  • Use the familiar Visual Studio Locals, Watches, Memory and Breakpoints windows with HLSL shaders, including DirectCompute code
  • The Debugger supports all HLSL shader types: Vertex, Pixel, Geometry, and Tessellation
 Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Graphics Profiler
  • Direct3D Frame Profiler
  • Automatic bottlenecks and performance determination on a per-draw call and Direct3D Perf Markers basis
  • Frame timings page for advanced draw call timing measurements