Advances in Ray Tracing Developer Tools

March 21th, 2024 | S62398

Aurelio Reis | Director, NVIDIA Graphics Developer Tools

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 Agenda

1 Introduction

2 The Game Development Journey

3 Developer GPU Challenges

4 Advances In Tools

5 Case Studies

6 Conclusion + Q&A

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The Game Development Journey
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 Game Development in 2024
Some New Challenges, Some Old Challenges, Many New Opportunities

Ideation Pre-Production Production Finalization Shipped

Cost

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 Game Development in 2024
Some New Challenges, Some Old Challenges, Many New Opportunities

Cheating
Continuous Content Delivery

AI/ML for Content Creation

Photorealistic Rendering vs Performance

Building Larger/More Complex Worlds

AI/ML for Autonomous Agents

Security

AI/ML for Graphics

Increasing Costs of Development
Alan Wake 2 | Remedy
Growing Load Times Cyberpunk 2077 | CD Projekt Red

Bugs & QA

Multi-Platform Development

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 2024: Ray Path Tracing in Games
Light Years Beyond Hybrid Ray Tracing

Alan Wake 2 | Remedy

Cyberpunk 2077 | CD Projekt Red

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 Technologies

• NVIDIA Ada Lovelace Architecture

• Path Tracing SDK
• RTXDI
• DLSS 3.5
• DLSS-FG
• DLSS-RR
• Reflex
• ACE
• Remix
Alan Wake 2 | Remedy
• SER (Shader Execution Reordering)

Cyberpunk 2077 | CD Projekt Red

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Developer GPU Challenges
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 Developer GPU Challenges in 2024
Just Make It Faster, Less Buggy, Prettier. Easy Right?

Asynchronous Workloads

GPU Crashes
Memory Management

Slow Streaming/Load Times

Shader Programming

Ray Tracing Bugs

GPU Performance Issues

Alan Wake 2 | Remedy

GPU/CPU Bottlenecks Ray Tracing Performance

API Complexity

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 Developer Tools
Nsight Systems Nsight Graphics Nsight Aftermath

Nsight Perf SDK

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 Graphics Triage Workflow

Nsight Systems
Comprehensive workload-level analysis

Performance Yes

Game Issue? Yes

Start Here No No Finished

GPU limited? CPU limited? (for now)

Rendering Yes
Issue?
Yes

Nsight Graphics
Detailed graphics debugging/profiling

Rendering Fixed

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Advances In Tools
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 Nsight Systems

Collect multiple seconds or minutes of trace data

CPU Core Utilization

GPU Scheduling
GPU HW Metrics
GPU Memory

Stutter Analysis

GPU Memory

CPU Sampling Profiler

w/ Call Stacks
CPU Tracing of GPU APIs

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 Nsight Systems
Powerful Memory Inspection Features

Allocated VRAM
w/ Physical Watermark
Resource Allocations

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 Nsight Systems 2024.2
New features

OpenXR Trace

D3D12 Work Graphs trace

System-wide trace of D3D12 and Vulkan (attach to multiple running apps)

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 Nsight Systems 2024.2
VRAM Demotions in D3D12

Excessive commitment of resources to VRAM memory causes memory demotion.

Nsight Systems visualizes resource migration from VRAM to SYSMEM (Green to Red migration on the timeline)

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 Nsight Systems 2024.2
Stutter caused by Resource Migration

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 Nsight Graphics
Empower Your Next-Gen Graphics

Debugging: Windows
C++ Frame Serialization Linux
Resource Viewer Android
Pixel History LuminOS
API inspection
GPU Crashes x64
ARM
Profiling:
GPU Trace
Shader Profiler D3D+11/12, DXR
Shader Timing Heatmap Vulkan 1.2, VRT
OpenGL 4.6

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 Nsight Graphics in 2023
What's The Story So Far?

• Opacity Micromap Support

• Ray Tracing Inspector
• DirectStorage Support
• D3D12 Work Graphs Support
• GPU Trace: Realtime Shader Profiler
• GPU Trace (Frameless Traces)
• Instruction Stats for GPU Trace
• Loads of Vulkan Extensions...
• So. Many. Bugs.

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 Nsight Graphics 2024.1
Starting Out The Year Strong

GPU Trace: Events List

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 Nsight Graphics 2024.1
Starting Out The Year Strong

GPU Trace: Incomplete Data Visualization

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 Nsight Graphics 2024.1
Starting Out The Year Strong

GPU Trace: Trace Analysis Improvements

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 Nsight Graphics 2024.1
Starting Out The Year Strong

GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Export to CSV

Improved Line Mappings

Hotspots view improvements

Shader Pipelines View improvements

General UI/UX improvements

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Shader Debugging In 2023

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Introducing the All-New Nsight Shader Debugger!

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 Nsight Shader Debugger
Because Writing Large Shaders Is Challenging

A fully HW accelerated GPU shader debugger

All code is running on the GPU, no CPU side emulation
• Supported APIs
Vulkan & Vulkan Ray Tracing
D3D12 & DXR soon!
• Features
HW Based
Conditional breakpoints
Step in/out/over
Locals/Watch variable inspection
Warps stopped per-line
Focus Picker
• Considerations
2 GPUs a required: 1 for system rendering and 1 for GPU debugging
Must compile shaders with debug symbols (good 'ole "-g" / "-Zi")
Must run tool in Administrator mode

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 Nsight Shader Debugger
2 GPUs Are Required

1 System, 2 GPUs 2 Systems, 1 GPU Each

Remote Connection
Host & Target Host Target

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 Nsight Shader Debugger
Because Writing Large Shaders Is Challenging

Focus Picker

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 Nsight Shader Debugger
Because Writing Large Shaders Is Challenging

Locals

Warp Info

Source Code
& Breakpoints

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 Nsight Shader Debugger
Because Writing Large Shaders Is Challenging

Conditional
Breakpoints

Breakpoints List

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 Nsight Shader Debugger
Because Writing Large Shaders Is Challenging

What's Next?

• Public Launch

• Nsight Shader Debugger SDK

• D3D12/DXR Support

• Work Graphs Support

• Mesh Shader Support

• DebugBreak via code??

• and... what would you like to see?

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 Nsight Aftermath
GPU Crashes Happen, Find Out Why
Faulting Warps

MMU Fault Identification

Source Line Correlation

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Nsight Aftermath 2024.1
Full Resource History

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 Ray Tracing Inspector
● Visualize acceleration structures ● Navigate through the scene
● Analyze build flags ● Expose raw buffer data

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 Ray Tracing Inspector
● View traversal timing heatmaps ● Observe overlapping AABBs
● Hide & show geometry ● Change build flags

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Case Studies
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Ray Tracing Inspector with Alan Wake 2
(Remedy Entertainment)
● Poor performance in this underground scene
● Sorting by primitive count unveils some suspicious geometry

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Ray Tracing Inspector with Alan Wake 2

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 Comparison of Traversal Heatmaps

Before After
Max Traversal Time: 38,000,000 clock cycles Max Traversal Time: 490,000 clock cycles
options options

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Path tracing regime

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Unit throughputs on timeline

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Avg unit throughputs

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

SM occupancy with warp types

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

SM occupancy with warp types

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

No symbols

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 The Importance Of Shader Symbols
A quick PSA about Debug Symbols

Without Debug Info

• Debug Symbols are required for the tools to map

intermediate code to high level shader code.

• Without symbols you are left with intermediate code

or low-level assembly (called SASS in NVIDIA GPUs)

• Check out this great blog post by NVIDIA DevTech

With Debug Info
Louis Bavoil that goes into detail on why debug
symbols are so important and how to ensure that you
are generating them:

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Sample distribution

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Avg latency

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Sample distribution

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Any hit shader

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Triangle normal used in anyhit

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 GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Normal used for alpha test?

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GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Material

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 GPU Trace: Real-Time Shader Profiler

Material alpha is sampled using SampleGrad

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Conclusions + Q&A
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 We're Hiring!

Graphics Developer Tools Software Engineer JR1976690

Graphics Profiler Tools Software Engineer JR1981013

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 Conclusions
Development Is Hard But We're Here to Make It Easier

• Find issues in shaders and fix bugs faster using a good Shader Debugger
• Use the Ray Tracing Inspector to ensure that your ray tracing backend is working properly
• Nsight Aftermath should be integrated into your application to help find and fix GPU crashes
• GPU Trace and the Realtime Shader Profiler are essential tools for analyzing performance
• Performance analysis is an ongoing process -- analyze, iterate and repeat to reach your target
• There are lots of resources available if you want to learn more about ray tracing, including the
free Ray Tracing Gems II eBook:

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THANK YOU!
Questions?

@AurelioReis @NVIDIAGameDev

Get it at developer.nvidia.com/nsight-graphics
Contact us at [email protected]
File bugs using the Feedback Button
Learn & explore by using the integrated samples
Check out more videos on YouTube: search 'NVIDIA Developer'

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