ShaderPerf 2.0 and FX Composer 2

ShaderPerf is NVIDIA's shader performance profiler, showing estimated performance metrics for GPU execution via simulation. It can simulate execution on multiple GPUs without having to be run on the target hardware, and uses the same technology present in FX Composer to show you how your shader will run.

The current public version stopped at support for Forceware 81.95 and GeForce 7-series hardware, so an update is well due. Version 2.0 will support seperate vertex and pixel shader analysis, although only for HLSL in the post-GDC beta, and it comes integrated into FX Composer 2. It supports Forceware 100-series display drivers, but doesn't support DX10 or DX10 shader profiling (including GS shaders) quite yet.

Its capabilities have also been beefed up with a cross-driver comparison tool, so you can do cross-GPU and cross-driver performance evaluation of your shaders to see how both factors will influence the performance of your application. It'll carry on supporting final pixel throughput (Mpix/sec perf measurement) for hardware targets it knows about, and it'll let you profile per-technique and output register counts and cycles taken to execute on a given driver and GPU.

The tight integration into FX Composer 2 along with the new features seems like the logical step for ShaderPerf to take, and the cross comparison over driver revisions and with multiple GPUs can potentially save some physical profiling on a target hardware setup, letting you do your base work there in FX Composer 2 as a simulation.

FX Composer 2

FX Composer competes with AMD RenderMonkey in the IHV-provided shader authoring tool space, and v2 gets support for COLLADA FX as well as HLSL, GLSL and Cg, providing potential for further integration into a content pipeline, using COLLADA as the interchange format for sharing application assets between tools being used.

FX Composer 2 will inherit DX10 shader authoring support at some point, although we're not sure when. Hopefully sooner rather than later since a version that supports Shader Model 4.0 with ShaderPerf support likely at the top of developer's lists of tools to have.

Composer will also gain subscription to a user-fed shader library maintained by NVIDIA, letting it automatically give you access to the latest published techniques and shaders without you having to go hunting for it. Whether it'll also let you subscribe to other developer news and content feeds isn't known at this point, although we hope that's the case. And that brings us nicely on to the new shader library.