Search Paths#

The Options dialog, accessed via the Tools > Options… menu, allows you to configure the search paths relevant to Nsight Aftermath. The options selected are persisted in user settings for the next time you run the tool.

Search Paths#

On the Search Paths tab, you can configure search path settings for shader and application debug files used by the NVIDIA Nsight Aftermath GPU Crash Dump Inspector, NVIDIA Nsight Graphics Capture, NVIDIA Nsight Graphics OpenGL Frame Debugger, and other tools.

Shader Source specifies a list of directories where shader source files can be found. This option is used to associate the high-level shader (HLSL, GLSL, etc.) source files that are used in your application to the file names that are embedded in shader objects by your shader compiler. In many cases, source files are already be embedded into the shader binaries, but in some cases, especially if the shader compilation tool-chain that is used has its own proprocessing steps, only source file information may be available.
Shader Binaries specifies a list of directories where pre-compiled binary shader objects (DirectX shader binary files generated by the HLSL compiler, SPIR-V shader binaries, etc.) can be found. For example, when opening an Nsight Aftermath GPU crash dump, those paths are searched for the shader binary matching the shader hash to access the DXIL/SPIR-V instructions or retrieve source mapping information.
Separate Shader Debug Information specifies a list of directories where shader debug information files separate from the shader binary can be found. These are the shader debug information files that may have been produced by your compiler toolchain when compiling the shader binaries (.lld or .pdb files generated by dxc.exe for instance).
NVIDIA Shader Debug Information specifies a list of directories where NVIDIA shader debug information files can be found. These are the shader debug information files generated by the Nsight Aftermath GPU Crash Dump Monitor (.nvdbg files) or the files created based on the data provided by the shader debug information callback for applications that are instrumented with the GPU crash dump collection feature of the Nsight Aftermath SDK. Shader debug information is identified by a unique shader debug information identifier embedded into the crash dump file. The shader debug information identifier is used to search for the shader debug information file in the configured search paths when it is required for mapping shader microcode instructions of active or faulted shader warps to shader IL instructions or shader source lines.
Application Debug Information specifies a list of directories where debug information (e.g., PDB files or shared object files with debug information) for the application that is analyzed and the dynamic libraries it has loaded can be found. This is necessary to resolve application call stacks in several views.
For all of the above paths, it is possible to recursively search the configured directories by enabling the Search sub-directories option that is associated with each.