A consistent challenge when working with D3D12/DXR or Vulkan is having to manage GPU crashes that are difficult to track down and resolve.
Consider this scenario: A programmer inadvertently induces a TDR (GPU timeout) by causing a shader to execute an infinite loop or by attempting to access a deleted resource. This TDR forces a reset of the GPU, which makes it difficult to find the issue. With Nsight Aftermath, you’ll get a GPU crash dump that you can open in NVIDIA Nsight Graphics. This crash dump will provide detailed information on where the TDR occurred, relative to markers placed in the code as well as the location in the shader code. These dumps are a few KB in size so can easily be shared with your team or uploaded to a server for later review.
In addition to aiding to improve critical development time, Nsight Aftermath data collection has very low overhead, allowing you to ship it with your application in order to catch GPU crashes ‘in the wild’. Those hard to find GPU crashes that frustrate your customers can now finally be diagnosed and fixed, letting you provide the most stable application possible when running on NVIDIA GPUs !
Nsight Aftermath SDK 2019.1 launches today as a standalone product, and includes samples for the first time, available here. Vulkan/NVIDIA VKRay support will be coming in a future release. If you use UnrealEngine, legacy Aftermath support is in place already, and version 2019.1 will be supported in a future release.
Key Features
- D3D12/DXR Support
- Small and Portable GPU Crash Dump File
- Nsight Graphics Support for viewing GPU Crash Dumps
- TDR/Page Fault/Exception detection
- Source code line correlation
- Markers & Callstacks (to identify crash location)
- GPU State information
- Simple to use API via compact Library/Header
- Example Code Sample