I'm having a problem with Visual Studio 2013's Graphics Diagnostics feature with C++ win32 desktop projects, and I'm hoping someone won't mind quickly testing this. I'm not sure if it's a problem with my environment/install or a bug in VS, and searching the internet for the error message I'm receiving isn't giving me any results.
Background
The short of it is that I was doing some GUI work on my project, and it's rendered last after all the other passes. I had an issue where one of the GUI draw submissions wasn't outputting anything at all, so I started the app with ALT-F5 for Graphics Diagnostics and hit printscreen for a frame capture. The idea being I could check the Graphics Pipeline Stages tab for that draw call and see where the problem was with that call. However when I clicked the relevant draw command in the Event List tab, the Pipeline Stages tab simply read "The selected event has no effect or may have been occluded." instead of showing the usual pipeline stages for that draw as seen here - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh873194.aspx
Must be a really broken draw call right? But if I clicked an earlier draw call whose output I can see in the final frame, it still read "The selected event has no effect or may have been occluded." in the Graphics Pipeline Stages tab, even though I was looking at it's output right there in the captured frame.
So as it turns out, none of my draw calls show up in the graphics pipeline tab, in fact, the only thing that would show there are my compute shader dispatches. Disabling the dispatches wouldn't fix the graphics pipeline stages tab for draw calls, but disabling all interaction with the CS stage across the entire frame will fix it. So I got to see my broken draw call was skipping the pixel shader entirely, and that the issue was in the IA or VS stages (ended up being a mismatched input layout to the vertex buffer).
The bug seems to be that any interaction with the compute stage of the pipeline prevents the Graphics Pipeline Stages tab from displaying the traditional pipeline view for any draw commands.
What to check
This is really simple to test if anyone has time and uses VS2013, just make some kind of interaction with the CS stage prior to a draw call and then ALT-F5 for diagnostics, printscreen to capture a frame, then right click a draw call in the Graphics Event List tab and choose Pipeline Stages. Post whether you see the IA/VS/PS/OM stages for the draw or the message "The selected event has no effect or may have been occluded.".
By any interaction i mean literally anything, for example simply setting a CS stage constant buffer to null during the frame, by placing the below code before a draw call:
ID3D11Buffer* noBuffer = NULL;
deviceContext->CSSetConstantBuffers(0, 1, &noBuffer);
Like I said I'm not sure at this point if it's a problem with my setup here or a bug I need to pass on to microsoft, and I'd really appreciate not having to make a clean install to find that out. So far it's reproducible on my system with any win32 desktop project, even a basic tutorial that renders a triangle.
You can also test it very easily with the hieroglyph3 BasicComputeShader project by simply building it without any edits and running Graphics Diagnostics (the included compute shader breaks the pipeline view for the final draw call, for me).
If you could include your OS and VS2013 update version that'd be great (in my case Windows 8.1 with VS2013 Update 2).
