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New Releases of NVIDIA Nsight Systems and Nsight Graphics Debut at SIGGRAPH 2022

Graphics professionals and researchers have come together at SIGGRAPH 2022 to share their expertise and learn about recent innovations in the computer graphics industry. 

NVIDIA Developer Tools is excited to be a part of this year’s event, hosting the hands-on lab Using Nsight to Optimize Ray-Tracing Applications, and announcing new releases for NVIDIA Nsight Systems and NVIDIA Nsight Graphics that are available for download now.

NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2022.3

The new 2022.3 release of Nsight Systems brings expanded Vulkan API support alongside improvements to the user experience.

Nsight Systems now supports Vulkan Video, the Vulkan solution for processing hardware-accelerated video files. In previous versions of Nsight Systems, a Vulkan Video workload would not be identified as a subset of the larger queue command it occupied. 

With full integration in Nsight Systems 2022.3, Vulkan Video coding ambiguity is removed and the process can be profiled in the timeline. 

Screenshot showing that Vulkan Video workload can be identified in the Nsight System timeline below the Vulkan tab
Figure 1. Vulkan Video workload can be identified in the Nsight System timeline below the Vulkan tab

With the new VK_KHR_graphics_pipeline_library extension, Vulkan applications can now precompile shaders and link them at runtime at a substantially reduced cost. This is a critical feature for shader-heavy applications such as games, making its full support an exciting edition to Nsight Systems 2022.3. 

To round out the new version, visual improvements to multi-report viewing have been made for better clarity. For Linux machines, improved counters for the CPU, PMU, and OS make system-wide performance tracing more precise. A host of bug fixes accompany these updates.

Learn more about Nsight Systems 2022.3.

NVIDIA Nsight Graphics 2022.4

Nsight Graphics 2022.4 introduces a robust set of upgrades to its most powerful debugging and profiling tools.

In the 2022.4 release, the API inspector has been redesigned. The new design includes an improved display, search functions within API Inspector pages, significantly enhanced constant buffer views, and data export for data persistence and offline comparison.

Watch the Nsight Graphics 2022.4 release spotlight video below to learn about the improved API inspector interface and the other new features in this update:

Video 1. Learn about the new features in the Nsight Graphics 2022.4 release with this spotlight video

Nsight Graphics GPU Trace is a detailed performance timeline that tracks GPU throughput, enabling meticulous profiling of hardware utilization. To enable even more users to utilize the power of GPU Trace, OpenGL is now supported for tracing and analysis on Windows and Linux.

Screenshot showing full GPU utilization timeline for an OpenGL application captured by NVIDIA Nsight Graphics
Figure 2. Full GPU utilization timeline for an OpenGL application captured by NVIDIA Nsight Graphics

Also new to GPU Trace, you can now identify subchannel switches with an event overlay. Subchannel switches occur when the GPU swaps between Compute or Graphics calls in the same hardware queue, causing the GPU to briefly idle. In the interest of performance, it is best to minimize subchannel switches, which can now be identified within the timeline.

The shader profiler summary has also been expanded, with new columns for per-shader register numbers as well as theoretical warp occupancy.

Image showing expanded shader profile summary section with new columns on the left that identify shader count and warp occupancy
Figure 3. Expanded shader profile summary section with new columns on the left that identify shader count and warp occupancy

Nsight Graphics 2022.4 is wrapped up with support for enhanced barriers that are available in recent DirectX 12 Agility SDKs. Applications that use either enhanced barriers or traditional barriers will now be equally supported. Learn more about all of the new additions to Nsight Graphics 2022.4

Nsight Deep Learning Designer 2022.2

A new version of Nsight Deep Learning Designer is available now. The 2022.2 update features expanded support for importing PyTorch models as well as launching the PyTorch exporter from a virtual environment. Performance improvements have also been made to the Channel Inspector as well as path-finding to reduce overhead. 

Paired with this release, NVIDIA Feature Map Explorer 2022.1 is available now, offering measurable performance boosts to its feature map loading process alongside additional metrics for tracking tensor values. Learn more about Nsight Deep Learning Designer 2022.2 and NVIDIA Feature Map Explorer 2022.1.

Get the latest Nsight releases

Additional resources

Watch a guided walkthrough about using Nsight tools to work through real-life development scenarios.

For even more information, see:

Want to help us build better tools for you? Share your thoughts with the NVIDIA Nsight Graphics Survey that takes less than one minute to complete. 

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