NVIDIA has released NVIDIA Parallel Nsight, a development environment for GPU-accelerated applications that work with Microsoft Visual Studio. Parallel Nsight provides several specific features for graphics developers:
- The Graphics Debugger allows developers to debug all HLSL graphics shaders directly on the GPU.
- The Graphics Inspector allows real-time examination of DirectX rendering calls and GPU pipeline state to craft optimal GPU code
- Pixel History shows all operations that affect a given pixel, helping developers to quickly identify rendering errors and to create optimal rendering code.
In addition, Parallel Nsight Analyzer allows OpenGL developers to optimize applications by presenting OpenGL API trace information on a timeline correlated with other GPU and CPU events. NVIDIA Parallel Nsight software supports Windows HPC Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Vista, which works closely with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Professional edition.
"Research shows that developers believe the most difficult tasks when developing parallel applications are debugging, performance tuning and designing parallel algorithms," said David Rich, director, technical computing at Microsoft. "By integrating GPU computing into Visual Studio, NVIDIA's Parallel Nsight is transforming the way GPU-based parallel computing applications are developed for Windows."
In a related announcement, NVIDIA also released CUDA Toolkit 3.1, an update to its CUDA SDK.
