NVIDIA Nsight Graphics

NVIDIA Nsight™ Graphics is a standalone developer tool with ray-tracing support that enables you to debug, profile, and export frames built with Direct3D, Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenVR, and the Oculus SDK.

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Learn how Nsight Graphics can be used to accelerate development and help make high-performance games with beautiful graphics.

Optimize performance.

Application optimization and hardware utilization shouldn’t be ambiguous. Nsight Graphics offers an unparalleled level of access into the performance markers of your graphics API—an invaluable aid in finding optimization opportunities that couldn’t be identified without looking under the GPU’s hood.

Debug graphics.

Nsight Graphics is the cornerstone of smooth development on NVIDIA platforms. Identify bugs and trace them back to their source on the target application. At its most granular, Nsight Graphics lets developers inspect every individual event involved in generating a frame—down to the pixel.

Boost ray tracing.

Ray-tracing debugging in Nsight Graphics enables the next generation of real-time rendering technology, improving acceleration-structure efficiency and optimizing axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs), build flags, and overlaps. The entire frame can be thoroughly examined to ensure the best image fidelity and frame performance.

Explore the key features.

Track GPU performance.

Analyze GPU throughput and utilization with minimal overhead for non-biased activity data. On the captured timeline, drill down into critical performance markers and inspect hardware unit throughputs, cache hit rates, memory throughput, and more.

GPU Trace showing a full timeline of application workload.

Trace analysis automatically identifying performance blockers.

Analyze GPU traces.

Nsight Graphics supports automated performance analysis on captured GPU traces. Deep profiling of streaming multiprocessor (SM) performance is accomplished by automatically tracing the execution of shaders across a series of frames.

Debug ray tracing pipelines.

Debug ray-tracing API calls and examine their state. Ray-tracing specific tools, like the Acceleration Structure Viewer, ease common pain points of developing ray-traced applications. Ensure ray-traversal speeds are high and eliminate unnecessary performance hindrances.

GPU Trace showing a full timeline of application workload.

Shader timing heatmap makes a stalling shader issue clear with a red hotspot.

Profile ray tracing shaders.

Profiling ray-tracing shaders can be an arduous task that requires extensive knowledge of the GPU. The Nsight Graphics Shader Profiler exposes shader data, including stalls and the reasons they occurred. For an even more immediate approach, the shader timing heatmap visualizes hotspots—overlaid on the scene itself—where shader times lagged per pixel. These features turn ray-tracing profiling into a highly streamlined and intuitive process.

Export C++ capture.

Create a self-contained C++ project that allows for frame analysis in a reduced CPU-load scenario. This lets you perform repeatable and isolated analysis without being bound to the original application and provides a protected environment for experimenting with optimization tweaks.

Images of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice courtesy of Ninja Theory Ltd; Hellblade is a Direct3D 12 / DXR game based on Unreal Engine 4.

Nsight Aftermath, for debugging GPU crashes and inspecting faulty shader code, can be integrated to display pipeline dumps in the Nsight Graphics user interface.

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Check out partner testimonials and ecosystem.

"Dassault Systèmes and its SOLIDWORKS brand have always supported bleeding-edge rendering technologies from NVIDIA. Nsight Graphics is one of our go-to graphics debugging tools. With valuable features like C++ Capture and Pixel History, Nsight Graphics has enabled us to solve complex rendering problems with ease."

— Siddharth Palaniappan, SOLIDWORKS Graphics R&D Development Senior Manager, Dassault Systèmes

"Vulkan is the cornerstone of Adobe’s multi-platform, multi-vendor rendering strategy for its Adobe Substance 3D products. Thanks to the ray-tracing extensions that NVIDIA pioneered and contributed to Khronos, Vulkan gives native access to ray-tracing hardware, offering exceptional ray-tracing performance on supported devices. In addition, Nsight Graphics and Nsight Systems are invaluable tools when it comes to understanding and improving the performance of Vulkan ray-tracing applications."

— Francois Beaune, Lead Software Engineer of Photorealistic Rendering, Adobe 3D and Immersive

“Nsight Graphics provides a huge productivity boost for our team, because it helps us to efficiently debug shader logic, parameters, or textures. Nsight Graphics additionally is invaluable to gain insights into memory layout of geometry and textures. The team is always eager to support our development efforts with best practices and new features.”

— Jan Ohlenburg, Director of Software Development, Maxon