July 13, 2006

NVIDIA tools deliver performance improvement

NVIDIA has introduced the NVPerfHUD 4 performance analysis tool, a robust profiling and visual debugging 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.1.

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 developer.nvidia.com/NVPerfHUD and the NVPerfKit 2 suite
of performance tools is available for download at
developer.nvidia.com/NVPerfKit.