The new graphics debugging functionality in VS2012 sounds great, but you can't use it with VS2012 express. I won't be making money with my endeavors any time soon, and the family budget can't justify $500 for VS Pro just so Dad can mess around with computer graphics.

I'm trying to learn DirectX 11, and my very first shader code is drawing nothing. I'm not having any luck with PIX from the old June 2010 SDK, it crashes when I try to run my program with it, even though my program can run without PIX. (It's just not drawing properly.) DebugView, which was quite useful in DirectX9 debugging, doesn't seem to work either.

Is there a free way to debug DirectX 11 shaders on a Windows 7 platform?

You can get far without spending any money on development software.

Concerning PIX: read here. Luckily I was warned by that thread then and blocked that update. Hopefully you can uninstall (if that's actually the issue and solves it ;)

Debug output will only happen when you have used D3D11_CREATE_DEVICE_DEBUG at device creation (not entirely correct: The control panel lets you select apps explicitly, but I never used that, so I can't comment on that).

That thread made me finally look into alternative GPU debuggers: The only one that worked for me was Intel's GPA Frame analyzer (works great for my NVidia and is the only one apart from PIX that works with my C# stuff). NVidia and AMD have "their" debuggers, too (NSight, GPUPerfStudio).

Good luck. Shaders are fun, especially with D3D11.

Edit: Important: I'm still using VS Express 2010 and Win7 so use my uninstall-approach at your own risk.

I didnt manage to make pix show shader SOURCE code using the new D3DCompileFromFile instead of june sdk D3DX11CompileFromFile (I have the windows sdk 8 installed on my windows 7), I gave up and turned back to the d3dx one.

Does nsight have a stand alone version ? I thought it was integrated into visual studio which would require the pro version as express doesn't support add ons ? I've been using it myself recently and although its better than nothing, I still prefer pix a graphics debugger. Intel GPA is another alternative which might give you some info.

As for pix crashing, can you attach a debugger to the process to see why it crashes ? I had a pix crash last week which ended being causes by the app trying to create a SW or REF device. Apparently pix only works with a HAL device (This was d3d9 of course).

Ha! I uninstalled (KB2670838) and now PIX will run my app farther so that my window opens to a white client area, but instead of throwing an exception like it did before, the computer completely freezes up such that I have to do a hard reset. When I run the app by itself, I get my cornflower blue screen (so the screen clear is working, or seems to be working) and it remains responsive enough to shut down.

The thing is, this is my very first run of my very first dx11 application, and I'm sure I have many misconceptions. I was hoping I could find out what those misconceptions are through debugging. It's enormously hard to learn something when your tools are taken away. I don't understand why Microsoft would deduce that only professionals need to debug. I don't see myself progressing in this environment.

Does nsight have a stand alone version ? I thought it was integrated into visual studio which would require the pro version as express doesn't support add ons ? I've been using it myself recently and although its better than nothing, I still prefer pix a graphics debugger.

Ah, true, forgot that. There's an NSight eclipse version coming with the CUDA Toolkit. Unfortunately that download alone is 1 Gb and my system partition is not capable of taking that load. Neither do I know if that is only working for CUDA stuff. Could anybody comment on that ?

As for pix crashing, can you attach a debugger to the process to see why it crashes ? I had a pix crash last week which ended being causes by the app trying to create a SW or REF device. Apparently pix only works with a HAL device (This was d3d9 of course).

Hmmm, IIRC you can force the REF device in PIX, but it will be terribly slow.

Ha! I uninstalled (KB2670838) and now PIX will run my app farther so that my window opens to a white client area, but instead of throwing an exception like it did before, the computer completely freezes up such that I have to do a hard reset. When I run the app by itself, I get my cornflower blue screen (so the screen clear is working, or seems to be working) and it remains responsive enough to shut down.

The thing is, this is my very first run of my very first dx11 application, and I'm sure I have many misconceptions. I was hoping I could find out what those misconceptions are through debugging. It's enormously hard to learn something when your tools are taken away. I don't understand why Microsoft would deduce that only professionals need to debug. I don't see myself progressing in this environment.

This is really painful if you're just starting out. Although PIX has some troubles with more advanced DX11 stuff and occasionally hiccups it's a bloody essential app.

After you've done your initial boilerplating you could at least read back textures/buffers and debug this way. But if you can't even render teh famous first triangle this is a vicious circle. I would be glad, too, if the graphics debugger became available for VS 2012 Express (until then, I probably wait with the install).

Also, have you tried the other stuff from the thread I linked (again: at your own risk) ? And also try running one or two from the SDK tutorials through PIX. Maybe you're really doing something so weird PIX would give up anyway.

Did you have at least success with the debug flag ? Feel free to show your code and debug messages, maybe we'll see something.

Well, it's not exactly my first 3D graphics program, as I had some experience with dx9. For my first dx11 app I went for broke with some fairly complex bezier triangle instancing making full use of tessellation.

I'll have to work on it for a while, but my suspicion at this time is that I'm probably instancing something ad infinitum, creating massive amounts of debug data that PIX can't handle, while the stand alone program just gives up in a less dramatic fashion.

Your first D3D11 app and you went straight for tesselation. Well, if that isn't bold.

As mentioned, PIX isn't of much use here. Well, it doesn't crash, but e.g. you can't debug these shaders.

Your first D3D11 app and you went straight for tesselation. Well, if that isn't bold.

As mentioned, PIX isn't of much use here. Well, it doesn't crash, but e.g. you can't debug these shaders.

I've never actually been able to get PIX to debug any shader even in the dx9 days. It always had crazy bugs that changed after every update. Still, it was useful just to see what the vertex streams were composed of. I'm quite sure that my vertex buffers aren't how I am imagining they ought to be. Staring at my code and waiting for an epiphany is discouraging, but I already found a couple of bugs that way.

I'm frustrated because PIX currently ends my computer session without any kind of error message, and without PIX my CPU code steps through fine and each frame appears to make it to the draw call. BTW I am also using C# with SharpDX.