PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for game developers – that hadn’t been updated in years for the desktop. It survived on in three generations of Xbox consoles, but there was no desktop love. No longer! Microsoft just announced PIX beta is now available for analyzing DirectX 12 games on Windows.

PIX on Windows provides five main modes of operation:

• 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.

Go to the Microsoft blog to download it for free.