Microsoft has announced a new service for Windows game developers. PIX is a performance and tuning debugging tool that has been around for a long time on Xbox. Now the company has decided to bring the tool to Windows 10.
PIX has been part of the Xbox makeup for three generations. For Windows, the service will give developers tools to analyze DirectX12 games on the platform.
It is worth noting that the tool is being launched in beta form for the time being. It comes with several captures, such as GPU, Timing, and Memory Allocation.
Microsoft says the best way to run PIX is with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update installed. Furthermore, there should also be 32GB of RAM, a Direct3D GPU and the latest graphics drivers.
The company has detailed the five main modes of the tool:
- GPU captures for debugging and analyzing the performance of Direct3D 12 graphics rendering.
- Timing captures for understanding the performance and threading of all CPU and GPU work carried out by your game.
- Function Summary captures accumulate information about how long each function runs for and how often each is called.
- Callgraph captures trace the execution of a single function.
- Memory Allocation captures provide insight into the memory allocations made by your game.
2 PIX
Microsoft has another service with same name as the new beta. However, the Pix camera app for Apple device does not use all capital letters. It is also a completely different tool, allowing users the ability to automatically improve photos and create live images. To do this, the app uses artificial intelligence. Sure, iOS already has a similar Live images feature, but Pix brings image stabilization to the party. The service also makes it easier to convert normal videos into Hyperlapse videos.
