DirectX12 Hardware Counter Profiling with Microsoft PIX and the AMD Plugin

May 17, 2017

The AMD Developer Tools team is thrilled to announce the availability of the AMD plugin for Microsoft’s PIX for Windows tool. PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for Windows developers using DirectX 12.

The AMD plugin exposes a large set of hardware performance counters inside of PIX. The counters will automatically show up in the PIX UI when running Analysis on a supported AMD GPU:

PIX allows you to collect performance counters for all draw calls in each command list executed by a PIX capture. The counter results appear in PIX’s Events view:

The AMD counters, when used in conjunction with other features in PIX, can provide information on how a particular draw call is using the GPU hardware, including information on hardware utilization and potential bottlenecks. This information can help developers optimize their D3D12 titles when running on AMD hardware.

The best part of the plugin is that it is included in the installer of the latest PIX release. There are no extra installers or configuration steps required in order to start using the plugin. Simply install the latest version of PIX and you will see the AMD counters when running PIX Analysis on an AMD GPU.

In order to use the plugin with PIX, please make sure you are using Crimson ReLive Edition 17.5.1 or newer.

We’d like to thank our partners at Microsoft for making the plugin possible! We look forward to continuing to work with the PIX team to add new plugin functionality in future PIX releases.

PIX can be downloaded from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pix/download/

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