Simulation / Modeling / Design

NVIDIA Announces Nsight Graphics 2020.2

Nsight Graphics 2020.2 is now available for download. We’ve added a number of features that dramatically expand the functionality of our tools when it comes to Vulkan, as well as making some great improvements to developer workflows for Microsoft Visual Studio users.

By popular demand, GPU Trace can now profile Vulkan based applications! When profiling applications using Vulkan, it’s possible to get primary and secondary command buffer timings, as well as barriers, synchronization objects and user markers correlated to the GPU unit utilization and throughput metrics. 

We’ve added a new ‘Advanced Mode’ to allow for advanced metrics collection. In this mode, GPU Trace will capture metrics over multiple frames, focusing on different metric sets for each frame. With ‘Advanced Mode’, you’ll have access to many more critical counters to aid in profiling.

Make sure your application has minimal changes over the course of the frames used to collate the metrics data to avoid divergence. To ensure those frames are executing as similar a workload as possible, we recommend pausing your simulation (or any updates that may alter the final image over those frames). To learn more about Advanced Mode, please read the docs.

While we’ve already had support for most of the new Vulkan 1.2 extensions, the addition of 3 new extensions means that we are now fully compatible with Vulkan 1.2 for captures, frame debugging and frame profiling. Specifically, we’ve added support for these 3 extensions:

  • VK_KHR_buffer_device_address     
  • VK_KHR_separate_depth_stencil_layouts     
  • VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore

We’ve also added support for 2 additional OpenGL extensions:

  • ARB_compute_variable_group_size
  • NV_representative_fragment_test

Nsight Graphics now provides quick and easy access to powerful graphics debugging and profiling from Microsoft Visual Studio via a new integration plugin. Utilizing the debug settings you have already set up in Visual Studio, this integration is a simple gateway to setup and launch your activity in Nsight Graphics. Just select the NSIGHT menu, the version of Nsight Graphics you want to use, and the Nsight Graphics action of interest. Note that in Visual Studio 2019 the NSIGHT entry appears by default in the Extensions menu and may be customized to be placed in the file menu with the ‘Extensions Menu’ customization offered by Visual Studio 2019 16.4 or later.

You can find out how to install this extension here: https://developer.nvidia.com/nsight-tools-visual-studio-integration

Vulkan developers dealing with GPU Crashes now have a great new tool; Nsight Graphics 2020.2 extends Nsight Aftermath support to Vulkan! You can now generate GPU crash dump files from your Vulkan application and get detailed feedback on the GPU state at the time the exception occurred. You can load the dump file into Nsight Graphics to visualize this information and look at the state of markers you placed in your code to pinpoint the problem, as well as view the source code of shaders contributing to the issue.

You can get the latest Nsight Aftermath SDK here: https://developer.nvidia.com/nsight-aftermath

For more details on Nsight Graphics 2020.2, check out the release notes.

Don’t forget to check out our new release of NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2020.2.

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