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.