GDC 2026: DirectX is Bringing Console-Level Developer Tools to Windows

The DirectX team is currently working to bring console-level GPU developer tools to Windows, beginning with a wave of new DirectX tooling features.

March 12, 2026
DirectX Console Tools Hero image

At GDC 2026, the DirectX team and their hardware partners hosted DirectX: Bringing Console-Level GPU Developer Tools to Windows at GDC. They shared their dream of bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows and announced a major step toward that goal with the biggest wave of new tooling features in DirectX’s history.

For the full announcement of everything they shared during the session, head over to the DirectX Developer Blog.

In a historic first, all four Windows GPU hardware partners joined DirectX at GDC 2026 to demonstrate these features running on their hardware. AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm have worked very closely with the team throughout feature development, and each has made significant contributions to make this release possible. This unprecedented collaboration represents the deepest GPU tooling partnership in Windows history.

DirectX Dump Files

GPU-related bugs can emerge at any point in a game’s lifecycle, and developers have sought more thorough crash-dump infrastructure to understand their causes. Our new DirectX Dump Files bring together critical data from all levels of the stack: hardware, usermode and kernel drivers, usermode and kernel components of Windows, and your game/application via new D3D12 APIs.

A single .dxdmp file tracks the hardware state (including page fault virtual addresses, register values, and shader program counters), driver and OS state (including D3D objects, pipeline state objects, DRED data, and callstacks), and up to 2MB of custom-selected data. It’s all captured while maintaining Windows process boundaries and protecting user privacy, even for kernel-level GPU hardware state.

DirectX Dump Files have been created with two critical developer scenarios in mind:

  • Retail device removals: collecting crash dumps from retail users
  • Local device removals: collecting crash dumps from developer (or QA) machines

New D3D12 APIs let you select from three performance-impacting levels: zero overhead (the default on capable hardware - no runtime performance impact), medium overhead (balanced data with moderate impact), and high overhead (maximum data from the hardware vendor).

On “Tier 2” hardware, zero-overhead dumps are enabled by default - meaning you may start receiving useful dump files without any code changes.

After a crash, you can either retain the dump file (e.g. uploading from retail gamers' machines to your servers) or let Microsoft collect it via Watson.

PIX Support

Our full PIX support for analyzing DirectX Dump Files is inspired by Xbox PIX’s support for hang dumps (“HIX”). PIX lets you analyze any DirectX Dump File in the PIX UI, regardless of which hardware was used to generate the dump file.

We are very thankful for our hardware partners’ collaboration, as they have written custom PIX plugins to expose hardware-specific information via the standardized DirectX Dump File UI in PIX.

For full details on how we worked with our partners on this feature, check out the announcement on the DirectX Developer Blog.

PIX API support will allow you to write C++, C#, or Python scripts to programmatically analyze dump files in your own environments.

DebugBreak() in HLSL

DebugBreak(), coming in Shader Model 6.10, will be critical for Live Shader Debugging (see below). In the short term, it can also be used to improve the actionability of DirectX Dump Files. We are adding new D3D12 pipeline state object flags to configure DebugBreak()’s behavior, with one option telling the driver to halt the GPU and immediately trigger a DirectX Dump File when a DebugBreak() is hit. This will enable assert()-like behaviors in both development and retail scenarios if necessary, allowing crash dumps to point more accurately to a causation rather than a downstream, GPU-crashing consequence.

PIX Event Configurability

PIX events and markers, such as PIXBeginEvent(), apply to both debugging and profiling, which means changes to improve one use case may hurt the other. Thus, PIX events would be absorbed by the D3D12 runtime.

New D3D12 APIs let you configure this trade-off. If you tell the D3D12 runtime to pass PIX events to the driver, then PIX events will be included in DirectX Dump Files to improve their actionability. This configuration also lets other driver-level tools use PIX events. See the Partner Announcements section below for examples of this in action.

Availability

We announced our expected schedule for DirectX Dump Files:

  • Mid-May 2026: preview availability via DirectX Agility SDK and PIX
  • ~Sept 2026: retail availability, allowing use in retail applications/games

We hope that many of you will try out our previews over the summer and send us your thoughts and feedback.

Previewing: Live Shader Debugging

Real-time, on-chip shader debugging, a much-loved Xbox feature, is coming to Windows. This is the deepest GPU-tooling collaboration with hardware vendors in Windows history.

We are targeting the first release of this in 2027, but you are likely to see public work for this in the coming months (DebugBreak() above is a good example!) so we wanted to provide early context about our goals and motivations.

Shader Explorer

Shader Explorer, new for PIX on Windows, builds on the back-end shader compilers that driver writers must create as part of Advanced Shader Delivery. Now, you can access low-level compile-time performance insights for your shaders alongside your HLSL.

Since the compiler is decoupled from the driver, you can use Shader Explorer to analyze shaders for any GPU in the wild.

The Shader Explorer Workflow

Shader Explorer integrates into PIX's GPU Captures, giving you an intuitive iterative optimization flow:

1. (Optional) Take a GPU Capture of your application and open it in PIX.

2. (Optional) Analyze your capture and find a shader to optimize.

3. Export a shader and its pipeline state object into Shader Explorer.

4. Iterate on that shader, making changes guided by the static analysis insights. Select different target GPUs to see how your changes affect each.

5. (Optional) Export the shader back into your GPU Capture and see its effect on rendering and performance.

You can also use the PIX API to analyze shaders programmatically, enabling you to write your own tools to analyze any or all of your shaders in bulk.

We look forward to sharing more details in May.

Partner Announcements

All four aforementioned hardware partners support DirectX Dump Files on their respective hardware, and all four have invested in PIX plugin support to surface their hardware-specific information through PIX's standardized UI.

For full details on all of these announcements, read the full announcement on the DirectX Developer Blog.

More PIX Announcements

PIX API

Our long-term vision is to give you programmatic access to everything that you can see inside the PIX UI, and this will be available publicly in May 2026, with support for C++, C#, and Python. It uses a D3D12-style nano-COM interface, supports all new PIX features immediately, and will light up additional PIX features over time.

Tile Mappings Viewer

A dedicated Tile Mappings viewer in PIX will help you debug and fix issues with your tiled/reserved resource mappings. It includes the ability to see tile information for your selected pixel in the Texture Viewer, see the mappings for a particular resource, and see the resources mapped into a particular heap. This will also be helpful for upcoming DirectX features - stay tuned.

GPU Hardware Counters in System Monitor

Low-level hardware-specific counters can now appear in PIX’s system monitor view while your application runs. Many thanks to our hardware partners for their help exposing this information via PIX plugins!

New GPU Capture File Format

Our rewritten GPU capture file format will see its first release in May 2026. Expect three main improvements: the ability to save Shader PDBs back into the capture file, the ability to show GPU Capture screenshot thumbnails in File Explorer, and performance improvements.

Stay tuned for details about PIX features built on top of this new file format later in 2026.

Capture/Replay Reliability

Reliability improvements to PIX's capture and replay infrastructure include turning on new D3D features by default, such as Application-Specific Driver State and RecreateAtGpuva, along with many other fixes to improve the consistency and reliability of your GPU captures.

Dr PIX

A brand new PIX API in Dr Pix will allow you to access and run all of the existing experiments, while a new experiment will help you measure how much improvement D3D12’s new Tight Alignment flag could bring to your application. These join last year's NonUniformResourceIndexing experiment in making Dr PIX an increasingly powerful tool for finding performance wins.

Update Notifications + What’s New

PIX will now automatically notify you when a new version is available, and an updated What's New page is built directly into PIX so you can easily see what changed.

Coming in May 2026

Our biggest wave of new Windows GPU tooling features ever will be available in preview in May 2026. DirectX Dump Files will reach retail availability around September 2026. Shader Explorer v2 with live/online analysis features will follow in late 2026. For all of the latest and greatest DirectX news and updates, visit the DirectX Developer Blog.

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