Hi, I am looking for some good profiler for Direct3D11 that would work on win7. Basically what I am looking for is something to show me Timeline of Frames rendered and detailed analysis of selective frames to analyse a trace with time spent in each section of code, etc.It would be great if I can get timings between GPU events also.

I tried Nvidia Nsight Visual studio edition couple of months back but it kept crashing so I deleted it and I don't think it (or maybe i failed to find it) provides detailed frame analysis in terms of trace and time spend in each section.

The graphics debugger in Visual Studio 2013 is fairly decent, and it seems to be getting better with each service pack or update or whatever they are calling them now. I'm not sure if it is included in the free express edition (I have an MSDN subscription through work, so I usually use the Premium version).

I started using Intel's GPA (graphics performance analyzer) when Microsoft killed off PIX.

It doesn't seem to exist as a stand alone application anymore (packaged with INDE), but you might want to try the frame analyzer in this software package:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/gpa

RenderDoc is Free, Opensource and works great! It is very lightweight compared to NSight and can be used as a portable standalone exe, yet is still very powerful.

It Provides GPU duration in each drawcall, timeline of captured frames, and of course many more features which should facilitate your requirements.

It has saved lunch for many people on many occasions. ;)

Of course theres also AMD PerfStudio and the VS2012+ graphical debugger which are popular. Both of them also work great! (I find RenderDoc to be alot faster and easier to use however, but that personal preference).

Your best bet is to just try them all out and see what works best for you!

@theflamingskunk

Yes RenderDoc is awesome I have been using it for months now and I find it way more useful than visual graphics debugger. It saved me nights on many occassions :)

That been said I never realized we can use it for profiling also (feeling really stupid right now). It works great specially with GPU events.

Visual Graphics Debugger works only on windows 8 (windows 8 sux) so thats not an option for me.

Windows 8 is, in my experience, a pretty decent upgrade on Win7, with the caveat that you need to use something like Classic Shell to bypass all the Metro garbage and get a usable start menu back. At that point, it is effectively a better Win7. Thankfully, from the looks of the Windows 10 preview, Microsoft is backpedaling from the worst of the Windows 8 UI idiocy.

For example, Windows 8 will install and run on my 2009 Asus EeePC 901, and is actually snappier than the XP that it came with. Windows 7 is a trainwreck there.

Now, whoever was behind putting the Metro start screen into Server 2012 deserves their own special circle of hell