Microsoft Unifies GPU Crash Diagnostics with DirectX Dump Files

Microsoft is bringing some of its Xbox console technology to Windows PCs with the introduction of DirectX Dump Files. When a GPU crashes on your PC, you can investigate what happened in the same way Xbox developers do with their GPU crashes, gaining insight into the underlying issues. With the latest Agility SDK 1.620 and PIX 2610.28, DirectX Dump Files provide data from Windows, Direct3D, and GPU drivers to help investigate a crash, understand its cause, and improve the graphics rendering pipeline to prevent future crashes. Joining Microsoft in this effort are AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.

The process begins with a GPU crash. Once the GPU stops its graphics processing, DirectX creates a new dump file containing traces of what occurred before Windows resets the GPU. This includes the last Direct3D runtime state, hardware and driver data, and up to 2 MB of data from the game developer that might be traced. These files can be saved on developers' machines, but on players' PCs in production, they aren't saved by default. However, game developers can set up a crash pipeline to send crash data back to them for analysis. Once the data is available, Microsoft's PIX tool, used for performance-tuning and debugging DirectX 12 games, helps analyze the situation. PIX decodes data, analyzes dump files, identifies hang points, and traces shaders and resources that caused the crash. This allows developers to quickly isolate and fix the problem. Read full story