NSight Graphics Debugging cannot start

2
votes

I am trying to debug a HLSL shader in VS2012 using NSight, but it can't start.

When I click on "Start Graphics Debugging", it seems like it starts the app for a moment, and then closes it (output windows from NSight shows several "shader loaded"/"shader unloaded" lines). Windows Event log doesn't show anything (except "NVIDIA Network Service" failing to start, but if I understood well, this is something related to updates).

On the other hand, if I start GPU Perfomannce analysis, then it runs fine.

Is there a place where I could see a log or something?

Alternatively, are there other ways to debug a HLSL shader on Windows, perhaps outside Visual Studio?

1
debuggingdirectxgpuhlslnsight
I had similar unresolved issues with NSight and use the outdated but still working GPU Perf Studio from AMD and OpenSource RenderDoc for debugging my graphical applications (DX11 is required). Both have their drawbacks, but together they are very useful. - Gnietschow

1 Answers

2
votes

Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 have their own graphics debugging engine. It's pretty good, especially with VS2013 when using Windows 8.1, but I believe it should work on VS2012 + Win7 as well. You can start a diagnostics session from Debug->Graphics->Start Diagnostics. Once your app is running, capture a frame and open it in the diagnostics tool. You can view buffer contents, textures and even single-step shaders.

There are some bugs and limitations, but at its best it works great. I've tried NSight and PerfStudio as well but never could get them to work as well as VS.