NVPerfKit 5.0

NVPerfKit currently has a 2.2 version number, but that hasn't stopped NV rev'ing the next coming release to 5.0, likely to synchronise with the version number of its main component, NVPerfHUD. NVPerfKit 5.0 will be the first to start supporting DX10 and Vista in its core components, via NVPerfHUD, NVPerfGraph, NVPerfSDK and the first Vista instrumented driver for GeForce hardware.

NVPerfHUD 5.0 sees a beta release for registered developers shortly after GDC 2007 and will support Vista and DX10 application profiling for the first time. It will also support new in-process debugging support for edit and continue for shaders and state, letting you change those aspects of your application while it's running, interactively and in real-time (or as close to real-time as it can, given the performance of the underlying application of course!).

We assume that NVIDIA will release revisions of NVPerfGraph and NVPerfSDK (upon which PerfHUD and PerfGraph are built) to further NVIDIA's DX10 and Vista toolset support, and that their PIX plugin is due an update too, to expose the same kinds of data that PerfHUD gets to expose to developers for developers that prefer that method of interactive application debugging.

All the usual good features of PerfHUD remain in the upcoming 5.0 release, such as call-by-call stepping through a frame (for finding those 2x speedups when you realise you've drawn your scene twice), GPU utilisation and performance counter display, the automated frame profiler, playback speed adjust and the sweet GUI overlay that relays everything to you.

NVPerfKit is perhaps the most well-known of NVIDIA's toolset, so the first release of the participating components with DX10 and Vista supports is going to be welcome by those developers putting significant efforts into developing on the latest generation of Windows and its newest API.