Channel 9 has a new video up talking about the new features in vNext with respect to Directx. http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Visual-Studio-vNext-DirectX-11-Development-Experience

To sum it up

- dds support viewing, and painting
- FBX support for viewing
- Node based HLSL tool
- Pixel Debugger

Not sure how useful these tools are going to be to be honest, they say their target audience is the beginner. For me personally, I would only use the dds tools. The FBX model viewer is handy I guess, but I would assume most people use a more efficient format, in which case I guess the HLSL is out the window too, as that is most likely only going to work with FBX models.

I found the video a little odd to be honest, they mentioned that there is no real tools for debugging your rendering or your HLSL, which is odd coming from the company that makes PIX , and there's also of course Nvidias PerfHUD and AMDs PerfStudio.

I was kinda hoping they'd integrated Pix to VS, but it looks like its only a subset.

The pixel-based debugger is pretty nice, and captures around 60MBs of data per frame (depending on the scene, of course) and not only can you click on a pixel to see how it cam to be that color, you can even follow the call-stack back into the C++ code to see where you might have screwed up a setting or whatnot. The editors aren't meant to be professional tools of course, but the debugger is something that ought to be handy for everyone. I haven't used Pix, so I don't really know how it compares, but I've only heard good things about it.

I'm not sure that the PIX stuff is a subset... just from the video is seems much improved from the current state of PIX on Windows, which when compared to the X360 version is like stabing yourself in the eyes with forks.

The ability to rotate around a mesh based on the data sent to the draw call is pretty cool and something missing from all debuggers (in any sane form anyway) and something I would have loved to have had when debugging some rendering stuff on our game earlier this year. (Looks like it uses the same viewport stuff as the FBX viewer)

The HLSL Node tool looks generic so should work with any program.


PerfHUD and PerfStudio are more for performance tuning than pix/vertex level debugging anyway so not quite in the same space; if I had a problem with output I'd goto PIX, if I had a problem with performance then I'd hit a vendor specific tool.

The pixel debugging feature looks great! I am already in love with VS and DX, but things can always be even better;)

I believe GPU performance profiling (in some form) is an upcoming feature in VS2011 as well.