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Frame Scrubber

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Application Development Environment for Heterogeneous Platforms, Visual Studio Edition 5.2 User Guide
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The NVIDIA Nsight Frame Debugger has two parts. One part appears as the Frame Debugger window in Visual Studio. The other part appears as a Heads-Up Display (HUD) on the target application.

The part of the Frame Debugger that appears as a HUD on the target machine is comprised of the following:

Understanding the Frame Scrubber

For the sake of discussion when it comes to graphics debugging, it helps to note some common terminology.

• An event is a single call to the API. It could be a triangle draw call, or backbuffer clear, or a less obvious call, like configuring buffers. A snapshot is a sequence of events.
• An action is a subset of the event types. It can be one of the following: (1) Draw Call, (2) Clear, or (3) Dispatch. Actions are interesting since they explicitly change data which may result in visual changes.

NOTE for Direct3D frame debugging: The Direct3D runtime documentation states that, "the return values of AddRef & Release may be unstable and should not be relied upon." The NVIDIA Nsight Frame Debugger will also take additional references on objects so any code that relies on an exact reference count at a particular time may fail. In general, users should not expect an exact reference count to be returned from the Direct3D runtime. For more information, see Microsoft's Rules for Managing Reference Counts.

Zooming In and Out

There are several ways to zoom in and out of the frame scrubber, depending on whether you are using the scrubber that is part of the HUD on the target application, or if you are using the scrubber on the Frame Debugger in Visual Studio.

To zoom the scrubber in the Visual Studio Host:

1. Select an event range: hold down the SHIFT key and click-and-drag the mouse along the event timeline.
   The selected range appears as a dark gray area.
2. Click inside the range.
   The event timeline zooms in, expanding the range to the borders of the timeline.

Alternatively, you can click-and-drag the either of the handles of the horizontal scroll bar.

You can also zoom in and out by holding the CTRL key while moving the scroll wheel on the mouse.

Scrubber View Options

Scaling

For Direct3D 9, Direct3D 11, and OpenGL applications, there are 4 ways to view the scrubber.

• Unit Scale is the default view, which simply shows the actions and events on the timeline.
• GPU Time Scale displays the GPU activity and how much each event or action cost the GPU.
• CPU Time Scale displays the CPU activity and how much each event or action cost the CPU.
• X by CPU, Y by GPU displays the CPU time scale on a horizontal X-axis, and the GPU time scale on a vertical Y-axis.

Direct3D 12

The scrubber view options are different for Direct3D12 applications. Here, you have two ways to view the scrubber.

From the Queue Mode drop-down, Queue Centric sorts the events by queue, while Thread Centric sorts the events by the thread.

Queue Centric versus Thread Centric Mode

From the View drop-down, you can select if you want to view the events in a hierarchical or flat format.

Hierarchical versus Flat View

Using Hotkeys to Scrub Through a Frame

When the scrubber has focus, you can use the following hotkeys to move the scrubber cursor from one event to another.

HOTKEY	ACTION
Navigation
CTRL + Home	Go to the first event.
CTRL + End	Go the last event.
CTRL + Left Arrow	Go to the previous event.
CTRL + Right Arrow	Go to the next event.
Up Arrow	Expand the current event group (HUD only).
Down Arrow	Collapse the current event group (HUD only).
F2	Current event: show less information (HUD only).
F3	Current event: show more information (HUD only).
Zooming and Panning
CTRL + Scroll mouse wheel up, or CTRL + NumPadPlus	Zoom in X-axis
CTRL + Scroll mouse wheel down, or CTRL + NumPadMinus	Zoom out X-axis
CTRL + 0	Reset zoom
CTRL + SHIFT + Scroll mouse wheel up	Increase row height (all rows)
CTRL + SHIFT + Scroll mouse wheel down	Decrease row height (all rows)
CTRL + Left mouse click and drag	Pan
ALT + mouse move	View zoom window
Cursor and Selection
Left mouse click on desired cursor location	Set cursor (Places cursor at closest point to the start of a range.)
Left mouse click on desired row	Select row (The selected row is highlighted in orange.)
SHIFT + Left mouse click and drag	Make range selection
Left mouse click on selection	Zoom to range
Left double-click on event action, or Right-click menu, Open API Inspector	Open API Inspector
Right-click menu, Run Frame Profiler	Run Frame Profiler
CTRL + A	Select all events

For the purpose of moving the scrubber cursor, the following are considered action events:

For example, if you are looking for the next draw method that was called, you can press the CTRL + RIGHT ARROW on the keyboard to skip over events that are not typically of interest, and only stop on events that are considered action events.

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