NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition

For compute developers working in Eclipse development environment, please see Nsight Eclipse Edition

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Development Platform, Visual Studio Edition brings GPU Computing into Microsoft Visual Studio (including VS2015 Community Edition). Build, Debug, Profile and Trace heterogeneous compute and graphics applications using CUDA C/C++, OpenCL, DirectCompute, Direct3D, and OpenGL.


Nsight Visual Studio Edition 5.0 debugging Direct3D 12 in Visual Studio 2015


“We had an aggressive framerate target for our recent milestone and NVIDIA Nsight was instrumental in our success attaining that goal

John Lafleur, Lead Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment

"Thanks for that wonderful tool. It is one of the best graphics tools for PC!"

Florent Guinier, Video Game Programmer, Ubisoft

"By the way, the new UI is awesome. I love that I can see the event timeline, GPU timing, as well as parallel draw times all in one view. Don't change it! :)"

Ryan Greene, Blizzard Entertainment

"Once you get hooked on Nsight it’s hard to live without it!”

Dan Ginsburg, President, Upsample Software, LLC

"NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition is a terrific tool for both debugging and analyzing the performance of your shaders and graphics code. My favorite feature is the powerful shader debugger and the way it integrates into Visual Studio. It has improved my workflow to the point where I almost don't know how I can write graphics code without it."

Greg Hjelstrom, Technical Director, Petroglyph

Please visit Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition 5.0 - New Features for a listing of the new features of the 5.0 release.

Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Debugger for GPU Computing

  • Debug your CUDA C/C++ and DirectCompute source code directly on the GPU hardware
  • As the industry's only GPU hardware debugging solution, it drastically increases debugging speed and accuracy
  • Use the familiar Visual Studio Locals, Watches, Memory and Breakpoints windows
  • Custom CUDA info page for navigating massively parallel threads states and contexts

Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Application and System Trace

  • Trace OS, multi-core CPU, Graphics and Compute APIs, Driver and GPU activities on a single timeline
  • Correlate OpenGL, Direct3D, CUDA and OpenCL activities to the exact CPU code line
  • CUDA profiler with unlimited experiments on live kernels
  • Specialized report pages with API call logs and statistics

Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Graphics Debugger

  • Direct 3D and OpenGL Frame Debugger with render state and draw call inspection. For API version support information, see the Nsight Visual Studio product requirements page
  • Debug HLSL and GLSL shaders directly on the GPU hardware. Drastically increasing debugging speed and accuracy over emulated (SW) debugging. For API version support information, see the Nsight Visual Studio product requirements page
  • Use the familiar Visual Studio Locals, Watches, Memory and Breakpoints windows with GLSL and HLSL shaders, including DirectCompute code
  • The Debugger supports all HLSL and GLSL shader types: Vertex, Pixel, Geometry, and Tessellation

Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Graphics Profiler

  • Direct3D (including DirectCompute dispatches) and OpenGL Frame Profiler
  • Automatic bottlenecks and performance determination on a per-draw call and Direct3D Perf Markers basis
  • Frame timings page for advanced draw call timing measurements