Graphics card firm NVIDIA has announced the NVPerfHUD 4 performance analysis tool, a robust profiling and visual debugging heads-up display (HUD) program for Direct3D applications supporting Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and Windows XP on select NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs).
Recently surveyed GPU software developers using NVPerfHUD 4 experienced an average performance improvement of 35% and found an average of 11 rendering bugs.
Part of the NVPerfKit 2 suite of performance tools for software and game development, NVPerfHUD 4 allows developers to quickly debug and profile applications by using data from the application, driver, API, and GPU.
Major new enhancements to NVPerfHUD 4 include:
- Frame Profiler Mode—Provides automated performance analysis using GPU performance counters; automatically running a series of tests to sort and list the most expensive render states and draw calls. Graphs such as draw-call duration, unit bottlenecks, double-speed z/stencil, pixel counts, and others are also provided.
- Unit Utilization Graphs—Shows the vertex assembly, vertex shader, pixel shader, and raster operations workloads within the Performance Dashboard.
- Playback Speed Adjustment—Simplifies finding frames to debug and profile by pausing or changing the playback speed of an application—from 1/8th speed to 6x speed—within the Performance Dashboard.
- Enhanced User Interface—Includes updated GUI elements, configurable graphs, and automatic graph scaling.
NVPerfHUD 4 supports Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and Windows XP on NVIDIA GeForce 7 Series GPUs, NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series GPUs and NVIDIA Quadro FX or more recent GPUs; older GPUs are supported with reduced functionality.
The NVPerfHUD 4 performance analysis tool is currently
available for download at Nvidia's website, and the NVPerfKit 2 suite of performance tools is
also available.
