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Nsight Graphics 2026.1

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Graphics 2026.1 is released with the following changes

New Features:

Graphics Capture / Graphics Debugger

  • Applications that are being "captured" can now be left open while actively debugging an application. This helps ensure you capture the scene of interest before closing out your application.

  • The Nsight Graphics SDK, released as beta, now allows for programmatic control of Graphics Capture and GPU Trace activities. This C++ library is header-only and straightforward to integrate. There are functions for injection, defining frame boundaries, and triggering captures and traces. An SDK User Guide is available in the documentation.

GPU Trace

  • [Preview] It's now possible to take a GPU Trace of a Graphics Capture live replay, allowing you to quickly profile your capture. Have a shader that is performing poorly? Edit it in realtime using the shader editor and take a new trace to compare performance. Look for the new button near the toolbar at the top.
    Please note that while this feature is considered stable, it is in a preview state and likely to change as it nears completion.

  • The Shader Profiler now offers the ability to view layer fusion breakage in order to help you better optimize cooperative vector operations. CoopVec is essential for neural rendering and this feature is an important part of the analysis workflow that will help you make neural workloads performant.

Shader Debugger

  • The Shader Debugger now supports visualizing local variables in a data tip window, making it even easier to inspect values within the context of your shader source code. Mouse over the variable to bring up the data tip, which supports ‘plain-old-data’ as well as complex types like vectors and structs. Pin the data tip in the window and it will update as the program execution changes via stepping or changing thread focus.

Improvements:

GPU Trace

Added support for the following Vulkan extensions:

  • VK_KHR_copy_memory_indirect

  • VK_KHR_swapchain_maintenance1

  • VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9

Added support for the following D3D12 features:

  • ID3D12CommandQueue1

  • ID3D12DeviceFactory1

  • ID3D12PipelineState1

  • ID3D12StateObjectProperties2

D3D12 Fence Waits are now represented in the tool.

Graphics Debugging

Added support for the following Vulkan extensions:

  • VK_EXT_shader_subgroup_partitioned

  • VK_EXT_shader_long_vector

  • VK_KHR_internally_synchronized_queues

  • VK_NV_display_stereo

  • VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder

Added support for the following D3D12 features:

  • ID3D12CommandQueue1

  • ID3D12DevicePreview

OpenGL Frame Debugger

  • The Nsight Graphics Frame Debugger activity has been transitioned to the OpenGL Frame Debugger activity. This is done to differentiate the capabilities of debugging OpenGL from debugging Graphics Captures for Vulkan and D3D12.

Removals:

  • The standalone “Generate C++ Capture” activity has been removed.

Deprecations:

  • Pascal Architecture based GPUs are no longer supported.

Known Issues:

GPU Trace Profiler, Frame Debugger Shader Profile, Frame Debugger Batch Histogram

  • Some GPU SKUs not typically encountered on consumer desktop systems may report "Unsupported GPU" errors. See this page for more information.