Nvidia Corporation, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, today released the NVPerfHUD 4 performance analysis tool, a profiling and visual debugging heads-up display (HUD) program developed for Direct3D applications supporting Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and Windows XP on select NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs).

Part of the NVPerfKit 2 suite of performance tools for software and game development, NVPerfHUD 4 allows developers to quickly debug and profile applications by using data from the application, driver, API, and GPU.

The manufacturer disclosed that according to the results of a recent survey, more than 100 NVPerfHUD 4 users reported an average performance speed improvement of 34.8% by using NVPerfHUD 4 to tune their applications. These users also reported that NVPerfHUD 4 helped them find an average of 11 rendering bugs during development. Results were obtained from individuals using a variety of system configurations and applications.

"NVPerfHUD 4 has instantly become one of our primary tools for performance analysis, optimization, and art testing," said Richard Sim, graphics programmer at Relic Entertainment. "Just when I thought NVPerfHUD couldn't get any better, NVIDIA came up with even more useful features - notably the Frame Profiler Mode - which add a whole new level to graphics performance analysis on the PC."

NVPerfHUD's Frame Debugger enables the user to freeze the current frame and step through it one draw call at a time, drilling down to investigate the details of each pipeline stage using advanced State Inspectors.

The enhanced user interface includes updated GUI elements, configurable graphs, and automatic graphics scaling. Moreover, NVPerfHUD 4 supports Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and Windows XP on NVIDIA GeForce 7 Series GPUs, NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series GPUs and NVIDIA Quadro FX or more recent GPUs. The manufacturer said that older GPUs are supported with reduced functionality.

"With NVPerfHUD 4, game developers have unparalleled insight into the GPU's inner workings," said John Vifian, director of developer relations at NVIDIA. "Developers can access the software's powerful analysis features, which are similar to those used by NVIDIA engineers, to uncover rendering errors and performance problems within their applications. The NVPerfHUD tool's unparalleled debugging, visualization and profiling capabilities make it a 'must have' solution for any game development pipeline."

But it seems that there are several other enhanced features such as Unit Utilization Graphs which shows the vertex assembly, vertex shader, pixel shader, and raster operations workloads within the Performance Dashboard, and the 'Playback Speed Adjustment' a function meant to simplify finding frames to debug and profile by pausing or changing the playback speed of an application, from 1/8th speed to 6x speed, within the Performance Dashboard.


The NVPerfHUD 4 performance analysis tool is currently available for download at http://developer.nvidia.com/NVPerfHUD and the NVPerfKit 2 suite of performance tools is available for download at http://developer.nvidia.com/NVPerfKit.