Comments on: Tools of the Trade – Part Four: PIX

By: SeC

SeC — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:33:28 +0000

Yes you can use NvPerfHud with XNA (NVIDIA GPU required ofc)

By: bittermanandy

bittermanandy — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:56:53 +0000

Camomilk: 1. not as far as I know. Would love to be proved wrong. 2. Absolutely no idea, sorry! But I’m sure a helpful reader can tell us, or perhaps ask the question on the XNA Creators Club forums.

By: camomilk

camomilk — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:23:10 +0000

I agree that PIX is a pretty awesome tool, but I have a couple of questions in regards to XNA:

1. Is it possible to set Perf markers to break up the D3D calls into more readable sections?
2. Can NvPerfHud be used in XNA? I find myself using NvPerfHud and PIX in different scenarios on our current project.

By: Seefer

Seefer — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:32:25 +0000

I’m no expert on XNA at the moment but something struck a chord while reading about your experience with DrawUserPrimitives. I may well be on the wrong track but maybe the information on Dynamic Vertex Buffers at the link below will help you in your search for improved performance of this section of your code.

Are your vertex and index buffers declared as VertexBuffer and IndexedBuffer? If so maybe look at using the dynamic versions of these (DynamicVertexBuffer and DynamicIndexBuffer)?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb975156.aspx

Love your coverage of your XNA experiences…keep it up

By: StraySocks

StraySocks — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:43:41 +0000

How arbitrary are the changes to the vertex data? Could you possible achieve the same effect with a static vertex buffer and having a more sophisticated vertex shader? Enjoying the blog BTW.

By: bittermanandy

bittermanandy — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:09:17 +0000

Roel: yeah, there’s some truth in that, though the web is full of “don’t use foreach” warnings as well, so you can never be sure.

Actually, in this test the vertices do change arbitrarily from frame to frame (the whole point of Kensei.Dev.Shape is that you can draw anything you like or not at will), though you may be right about the “real world”. I will certainly be trying a different approach to get better perf though.

By: gbegerow

gbegerow — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:31:53 +0000

Nice article. I saw PIX mentioned some time ago but it never realy got my attention. Now I will definitively remember to use it next time.

By: Roel

Roel — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:53:31 +0000

It doesn’t really surprise me that DrawPrimitiveUP causes problems; the web is full with warnings like “do not use Draw*PrimitiveUP, it is slow”. But do really all vertices independently change frame by frame? For the spheres test: no, and for most real-world scenarios: no.

By: nsthsn

nsthsn — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:42:34 +0000

Thanks again. Always enjoy these.