Nsight Graphics 2025.4

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Graphics 2025.4 is released with the following changes:

New Features:

• Slang support
  • All activities now support the Slang shading language when using the Vulkan API. Slang is a Khronos initiative to provide a modern, open shading language to the graphics industry.
  • In order to see improvements in tracking the format of debugging information generated by the Slang compiler, be sure to use the latest NVIDIA driver. This debugging info format is also used by the GLSL compiler when called with “-gVS” rather than “-g”.
• Graphics Capture
  • Graphics Capture has been promoted out of beta status. This release adds a number core capabilities, listed below, and includes many stability and bug fixes, including improvements in diagnosing and reporting error conditions that prevent successful captures or replays.
  • Added a Pixel History capability to the Graphics Capture Debugger for determining the events that cause revision for a texture resource. Easily discover and navigate to where and how a given pixel is revised.
  • Added a Root Parameters view to the Graphics Capture Debugger for viewing root parameters in D3D12 applications. The resources that the root parameters reference may be navigated to via links to other object-specific viewers, such as the descriptor view, the resource view, the object browser, or memory views.
  • The Graphics Capture Debugger now includes coarse GPU timing information in the Events view and Scrubber. This GPU timing does not replace a dedicated profiler but does provide a coarse estimation that can aid in identifying major bottlenecks.
• GPU Trace
  • Added support for Hardware Events collection on the Blackwell architecture. When the 'Hardware Event System' option is enabled, a new Compute timeline row will show precise compute ranges, giving you visibility into how your compute workloads overlap on the GPU.
  • Implemented tracing of VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering, VK_NV_cluster_acceleration_structure VK_NV_partitioned_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_draw_indirect_count
• Shader Debugger
  • The Shader Debugger now includes beta support for debugging Slang source files in Vulkan applications. Support for debugging Slang source shaders is available with this release, including stepping through code, inspecting variable values, etc. The Slang and NVIDIA compilers are constantly being updated to provide the quality of symbolics information to improve the user experience.
• Version Auto-Updater
  • When a new version of Nsight Graphics becomes available, clicking on the version alert will now open a built-in software update workflow. You will have the option to update immediately or on application restart, and can choose whether or not to keep previous versions installed.

Improvements:

• GPU Trace
• The SM Warp Occupancy timeline row better reflects the various warp types, resulting in fewer unattributed warps.
• Graphics Debugging
• Added support for capture, replay, and visualization of Vulkan Partitioned TLAS geometry, as demonstrated by the vk_partitioned_tlas sample project.
• Shader Debugger
• The JIT shader recompilation has been improved to be more reliable and provide better user control. The default now is to use the un-optimized shaders with debug symbols submitted by the user, meaning no source level recompilation is necessary. You can still use the source recompilation feature, where you will specify your command line options, etc.
• The ability to debug locally and remotely has been simplified to make it easier to set up. First, there are checks made prelaunch to ensure that your system(s) are set up as needed. Second, you can specify the GPU to have your application run on, which will limit the GPUs that Vulkan enumerates and ensure that your application runs on the correct GPU.

Deprecations

• Ubuntu 20 is no longer a supported Linux distribution. As always, Nsight Graphics may still run on unsupported Linux distributions, however we cannot guarantee compatibility or support outside of the listed distributions.

Known Issues:

• GPU Trace Profiler, Frame Debugger Shader Profiler, Frame Debugger Batch Histogram.
• Some GPU SKUs not typically encountered on consumer desktop systems may report "Unsupported GPU" errors.
• Shader Debugger
• Some ray tracing applications may encounter stability issues when attempting to change to debug shaders.
• Graphics Capture
• For full support of Graphics Captures against applications using megageometry support, the latest driver (as of July 31) is required.

For more details and known issues, please see the full release notes!

For an overview of Nsight™ Graphics and access to resources, please visit the main Nsight™ Graphics page.

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Graphics 2025.4 is available for download under the NVIDIA Registered Developer Program.

 Download   Documentation