PIX is a performance analysis

Performance analysis

In software engineering, profiling is a form of dynamic program analysis that measures, for example, the usage of memory, the usage of particular instructions, or frequency and duration of function calls...

 tool from Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 that can help software developers maximize the efficiency of Direct3D

Direct3D

Direct3D is part of Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface . Direct3D is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems , and for other platforms through the open source software Wine. It is the base for the graphics API on the Xbox and Xbox 360 console systems...

 applications. Originally for the Xbox

Xbox

The Xbox is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe and is the predecessor to the Xbox 360. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console...

 video game console

Video game console

A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...

, Microsoft has released it for the Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 platform as part of XNA

Microsoft XNA

Microsoft XNA is a set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates video game development and management. XNA attempts to free game developers from writing "repetitive boilerplate code" and to bring different aspects of game production into a single system...

to aid game developers.

Features

PIX can take a snapshot of an application running, store the calls to Direct3D and data used in that single frame, and recreate the frame step-by-step, allowing the programmer to see the intermediate contents of various buffers and devices, debug individual vertices and pixels, or see which call took the most processing time.

External links

• MSDN PIX documentation