Release Notes

See the latest features and updates for this version of NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition.

1. Release Notes 2021.2.1

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 471.12 or newer

1.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2021.2.1

  • General

    • Supports CUDA Toolkit 11.4 Update 1.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Bug fixes and performance improvements.

2. Release Notes 2021.2.0

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 471.11 or newer

2.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2021.2.0

  • General

    • Supports CUDA Toolkit 11.4.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Next-Gen Debugger supports the latest compiler enhancements in CUDA Toolkit 11.4, improving optimized code debugging.

    • Bug fixes and performance improvements.

3. Release Notes 2021.1.1

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 465.01 or newer

3.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2021.1.1

  • General

    • Supports CUDA Toolkit 11.3 Update 1.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Bug fixes and performance improvements.

4. Release Notes 2021.1.0

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 465.00 or newer

4.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2021.1.0

  • General

    • Supports the latest NVIDIA Ampere GPUs, including GA106.

    • Supports CUDA Toolkit 11.3.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Allow viewing of SASS Indexed Constants.

    • Added Memory Allocations to the Resources view.

    • Bug fixes and performance improvements.

5. Release Notes 2020.3.1

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 460.79 or newer

5.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2020.3.1

  • General

    • Supports CUDA Toolkit 11.2 Update 1.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Bug fixes and performance improvements.

6. Release Notes 2020.3.0

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 460.78 or newer

6.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2020.3.0

  • General

    • Supports CUDA Toolkit 11.2.

    • Support for Visual Studio 2015, which has been deprecated since 2020.2.0, has been removed. Current Visual Studio support still includes versions 2017 and 2019.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Supports CUDA Parallel Launch.

    • Supports Visual Studio breakpoint hit count.

    • New Memory Allocations view, providing information on CUDA global memory allocations.

7. Release Notes 2020.2.1

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 457.09 or newer

7.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2020.2.1

  • General

    • Supports CUDA Toolkit 11.1 Update 1.

  • Important Fixes

    • Some builds of Visual Studio 2019 had performance impacts when Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2020.2.0 was installed (possibly from CUDA Toolkit 11.1).

8. Release Notes 2020.2.0

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 456.33 or newer

8.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2020.2.0

  • General

    • Support for GA102 and GA104.

    • Support CUDA Toolkit 11.1.

    • Support for Microsoft Windows 10 Hardware Scheduling.

    • Support for Visual Studio 2015 is being deprecated and will be dropped in an upcoming release. Current Visual Studio support still includes versions 2015, 2017, and 2019.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Debugger Performance improvements, especially when loading modules.

    • New debugger option to 'Break on API Errors'.

    • New debugger option to 'Break on Launch'.

  • Analysis

    • Integrated Analysis Trace, deprecated since NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2019.2, has been removed. The replacement, stand-alone Nsight Systems tool is currently available and works with NVIDIA Nsight Integration for Visual Studio.

9. Release Notes 2020.1.2

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 451.82 or newer .

9.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2020.1.2

  • This was a bug fix release, primarily for fixing Debugger core dump issues.

10. Release Notes 2020.1.1

While you may already have an NVIDIA display driver on your target machine, this release requires a specific version in order to function properly:

  • Recommended Driver: 451.48 or newer

10.1. New in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2020.1.1

  • General

    • Support for GA100.

    • Support CUDA Toolkit 11.0

    • Support for Microsoft Windows 10 Hardware Scheduling.

    • Windows 7 (and WinServer through 2012R2) support, deprecated since 2019.4 release, has been removed.

    • Support for sm_30 and sm_32 architectures have been dropped and sm_35, sm_37, sm_50 support has been deprecated as of the 2020.1 release. The default compilation target is now sm_52 in NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE build customizations. (CTK-865)

    • Support for Visual Studio 2013 has been dropped. NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE 2020.1.1 Visual Studio support includes versions 2015, 2017, and 2019.

    • NVIDIA Nsight Integration, a Visual Studio extension, has been introduced to allow next generation, standalone, Nsight tool integration into Visual Studio. In particular: 

      • Integrated Graphics Debugging, deprecated since NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2019.2, has been removed and replaced by Nsight Graphics.

      • Integrated CUDA profiling, deprecated since NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2019.2, has been removed from the Performance Analysis tools and replaced by: 

      • Integrated Analysis Trace, deprecated since NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2019.2, has not been removed, but will be in an upcoming release of NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE. The replacement, stand-alone Nsight Systems tool is currently available and works with NVIDIA Nsight Integration for Visual Studio.

  • CUDA Debugger

    • Added support for the NVIDIA GA100 GPU.

    • Supports for the CUDA 11.0 Toolkit.

    • Added ability to control breaking on and reporting CUDA API errors.

    • The Warp Watch view is now available in the Next-Gen Nsight Debugger.

    • The Resources view is now available in the Next-Gen Nsight Debugger.

    • CUDA Task Graph support has been added to the Next-Gen Nsight Debugger.

    • Support for Pascal has been dropped from the Legacy Nsight Debugger, but is fully supported by the Next-Gen Nsight Debugger.

  • Graphics

    • Integrated Graphics Debugging, deprecated since NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2019.2, has been removed and replaced by Nsight Graphics.

    • Note that NVIDIA Nsight Integration, a Visual Studio extension, has been introduced to allow Nsight Graphics integration into Visual Studio under the Nsight menu.

  • Analysis

    • Integrated CUDA profiling, deprecated since NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2019.2, has been removed from the Performance Analysis tools and replaced by:

    • Integrated Analysis Trace, which has been deprecated since NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition 2019.2, has not been removed, but will be in an upcoming release of NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE. However, the replacement, stand-alone Nsight Systems tool is currently available and works with NVIDIA Nsight Integration for Visual Studio integration.

    • OpenCL profiling support in NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition, deprecated as of NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE 2019.3, has been removed.

11. Known Issues

11.1. Known Issues as of the 2021.2.1 Release of the CUDA Debugger

  1. In version 2020.3.0, Visual Studio breakpoint hit count support was introduced. As with normal conditional breakpoints, both the Visual Studio debugger and the NVIDIA debuggers take an increasing amount of time to run as the number of threads and iterations evaluating the breakpoint condition and count increase. Noticeable delays should be expected when using this breakpoint feature in heavily utilized code. (200666330)

  2. When the display driver is in TCC mode, reading managed memory in the Memory window or visualizing expressions containing managed data can sometimes return stale data if those regions have been written to from the CPU side and have not been synchronized back to the GPU memory. This issue does not affect unmanaged memory and managed memory in WDDM driver mode. (DTNSV-593)

  3. CUDA grid launch failures occur on Pascal GPUs when debugging with preemption enabled. A workaround for this issue is to use a second GPU for rendering the desktop, and use the Pascal GPU dedicated for compute work without a display attached. (55322)

  4. If you are using NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE on a Windows 10 x64 machine, you cannot attach to a win32/x86 CUDA application. Only 64-bit CUDA applications are supported. (44794)

  5. Half2 types are not supported for conditional breakpoints. (37814)

  6. Firewall and anti-intrusion software (e.g., McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention) will not allow remote debugger connections. Please disable or add an exclusion for the Nsight Monitor. (22804)

  7. In some cases, when the CUDA application is built with the "Generate Relocatable Device Code" option, and a CUDA kernel function is declared with the __global__ static attributes, the NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE debugger might not be able to display local variables inside that function. Users can workaround this issue by simply removing the static qualifier on the function. (21914)

  8. You must enable Memory Checker before launching a process, and cannot change the setting while debugging (applies to Legacy Debugger only). (18935, 18937)

  9. When the CUDA Debugger is used to debug CUDA applications which share resources with DirectX 9 (such as the "simpleD3D9" sample program), the debugger may display incorrect values for memory locations in those shared resources. This may happen when the GPU device executing the application is Compute Capability 2.0 or higher. Incorrect values for the contents of memory may be displayed in any debug window (Autos, Locals, Watch, Warp Watch, or Memory). This issue does not affect applications using Direct3D 11. (13899)

  10. When using the CUDA Debugger with NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE, breakpoints will not be hit in source files whose full paths contain non-ASCII characters. Any path with a character code >= 128 is affected. (11429)

  11. If you experience hangs or TDRs while locally debugging CUDA on a single GPU (or using the Software Preemption debugging mode in general), try disabling operating system features that use video hardware acceleration. For example, disabling Aero on Windows 7, changing to a high-contrast desktop theme on Windows 8, or disabling WPF acceleration.

  12. Variables do not appear for source code that is not executed. This occurs because the compiler aggressively optimizes code even if you have not specified any compiler optimizations. As a result, the compiler removes any code that will not be executed from the output executable.

  13. Breakpoints will hit multiple times on lines that have more than one inline function call. For example, setting a breakpoint on: 

    x = cos() + sin()

    will generate three breakpoints on that line. One for the evaluation of the expression, plus one for each function on the line.

  14. Unloading modules does not refresh the state of breakpoints set in that module. This means that those breakpoints do not show their latest state in Visual Studio when they have been unloaded.

  15. The Visual Studio Breakpoint "Filter" option is not supported for CUDA GPU breakpoints.

  16. The Visual Studio Breakpoint "Hitcount" option is not supported for CUDA GPU breakpoints.

  17. The F5 hotkey (which is the default hotkey in Visual Studio for starting the CPU Debugger) does not start the CUDA Debugger. To start the CUDA Debugger, you must either change the key bindings or use the menu command: Nsight > Start CUDA Debugging.

  18. There is no support for automatically performing a Build when launching the CUDA Debugger.

  19. The Load Symbols option, or "Symbols settings," in the Modules view is not supported for CUDA debugging.

Notices

Notice

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Application Development Environment for Heterogeneous Platforms, Visual Studio Edition 2021.2.1 User GuideSend Feedback

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