GPA 4.2: more feedback

[Benoit_Miller]

Hello,

I had a simple D3D problem to debug so I took the opportunity to install the latest GPA 4.2 update to troubleshoot it, but I have to say I am disappointed. Some of the requests I mentionned earlier this year have made it in, but others are still missing.

1) It is still a pain to set up application profiles. I hadn't done it in a while and was again confused by the startup dialog of GPA Monitor. It's unclear that the big white list at the top is NOT where you set up your application (that list is managed automatically), and there is no real connection between that list and the bottom parameters.

2) It is not possible to capture via a button or right-click in the GPA Monitor (or some other way than a programmable hot key). Hotkeys cannot work in our app because the focus window does not even belong to the same process that created the D3D device (separate C# game editor).

3) In the texture viewer, Floating-point textures such as R32F still display the hovered pixel in RGB form (which is meaningless).

4) There is no way to look at the alpha channel in the texture viewer.

5) You can now save a texture from the viewer, but only in PNG/JPG/BMP. These file formats are useless for troubleshooting textures that aren't 2D RGB (such as R32F, Mipmaps, Cubemaps or 3D volumes). You should be able to save in .DDS format with no conversion.

6) It is still not possible to look into shader constants, vertex buffers, index buffers, etc. This is the main problem for me, as this means I still cannot use GPA to debug most of my day-to-day problems; I have to fall back to PIX or switch platforms (Xbox 360) to do my GPU debugging.

I will keep an eye on GPA, every release gets better but it's slower than I expected. Please help me stop using PIX for Windows :)

Thanks,
Ben.

[Neal_Pierman]

Hello Ben,

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

Your feedback has been very valuable -- as you mentioned, some of your previous requests have been added to the product, but unfortunately others haven't yet made it into the product.

I've forwarded your current list to the product team for consideration in a future release of the product. They've told me that you should expect to hear back within the next few days regarding the disposition of your requests.

Regards,

Neal