I recently have been reading up on GDebugger which seems to be a popular and professional OpenGL debugger. While it does allow me to edit shader source code on the fly, I was really hoping for the ability to put breakpoints within my shaders, step through the shader execution, and see variable values on hover (Visual Studio style, or something similar).

Does anyone know any debuggers with this capability? I understand that this sort of thing would probably require some sort of GPU emulation and may perform wicked slow, but that wouldn't be a problem for debugging purposes.

In general, can people give me their general opinions on OpenGL debugging tools?

If you have an Nvidia card then you can use Nsight which lets you debug graphics programs through Visual Studio. You can set breakpoints in shaders, step through, etc. Here's a demo of someone using Nsight on YouTube:

I'm not aware of anything similar for AMD or Intel though.

Wow! That's exactly what I wanted, and I'm in luck because I have an NVidia card! :D

Thanks so much for pointing me to it!

Hi dpadam450!

Thanks for your input, I was curious to hear if anyone had that point of view. Do you think using a debugger would actually be detrimental to growing as a graphics developer?

I am developing a graphics engine for my game and while I have no bugs on my hands at the moment, I have been frustrated with how time consuming debugging has been in the past. OpenGL is designed for high performance, not for easy debugging.

Up to now, I have only ever done exactly what you said - dumping values to the screen. My only incentive is saving time. Time I lose writing temporary shaders/OpenGL calls whose sole purpose is to give me an onscreen picture of what has gone wrong. And sometimes a pixel picture is not always very telling.

For example, you write a new technique and on your first test you see a blank screen. Dozens of questions need to be asked - is the problem an OpenGL state variable issue, a shader issue, a problem with your loaded models/textures, etc? Being able to quickly answer these questions would save me truckloads of time. I also think using a debugger and profiler could potentially improve my understanding of how to write correct and optimal OpenGL applications.

What do you mean by an event recorder?

@TheChubu - Hahahaha...