You can now take a GPU Trace of a Graphics Capture live replay, allowing you to quickly profile your capture without leaving the Graphics Debugger. Have a shader that is performing poorly? Edit it in realtime using the shader editor and take a new trace to compare performance. The results are displayed directly in the Graphics Debugger UI without creating a standalone GPU Trace file. Once a trace is made, a layout menu is available to switch between debugging and profiling.
A timeline row now breaks down the SM warp occupancy on a per-shader basis, allowing you to directly visualize how individual shaders correlate to runtime occupancy. Use the Shader Warp Occupancy tab (next to the Metrics tab) to filter shaders by rank or occupancy range.
The Graphics Debugger memory tool has several enhancements for memory analysis. View memory budgets and usage grouped by heap and memory type, then filter the view to investigate further. Use the new memory treemap to compare resource and heap sizes and reveal unused heap space.
The Crash Dump Inspector has a new Resource Timeline view for page faults, showing a chronological list of resource lifetime and residency events relevant to the fault. This list contains significantly more detailed resource history for crash dumps generated on driver version R615 and above.
The Crash Dump Inspector supports reading shader debug info (.nvdbg) embedded within the crash dump file. To check if the shader debug info is embedded, use the “Show Symbol Files” button in the Shader Source view and check if the Shader Debug Info file path begins with “embedded-in-dump://”. For more details please refer to the Nsight Aftermath SDK 2026.3 release notes.
In GPU Trace you can now visualize all Wait/Signal pairings at once for D3D12 fences and Vulkan semaphores by selecting Overlays -> Overlay All Wait/Signal Pairings. Previously you could only see these overlays when selecting individual Wait/Signal items.
CUDA in Graphics supports recording to a D3D12 Command list through stream management. This is now supported in GPU Trace, and CUDA actions show up alongside D3D12 Command lists.
The SDK has new functions for checking if a capture or trace file has completed writing, and to get the final filename that was written: NGFX_GraphicsCapture_WaitForCaptureFilePath(), NGFX_GraphicsCapture_GetCaptureFileCount(), NGFX_GraphicsCapture_GetCaptureFilePath(), NGFX_GPUTrace_WaitForCaptureFilePath(), NGFX_GPUTrace_GetCaptureFileCount(), NGFX_GPUTrace_GetCaptureFilePath().
The Shader Profiler in the legacy Frame Debugger, now called OpenGL Frame Debugger, will be deprecated in Nsight Graphics 2026.4. For shader profiling, use GPU Trace, which has the shader profiler as well as many more profiling capabilities.
Some GPU SKUs not typically encountered on consumer desktop systems may report "Unsupported GPU" errors. See this page for more information.