NVIDIA Introduces Parallel Nsight Open Beta for Microsoft Visual Studio developers

By DE Editors

NVIDIA is releasing a new open beta of Parallel Nsight with several new features for Microsoft Visual Studio users who are taking advantage of graphics processing units (GPU) for general purpose programming.

Parallel Nsight is a plug-in that allows Microsoft Visual Studio programmers to develop for both GPUs and CPUs within a single development environment. This new release adds support for the new features found in the latest GeForce and Tesla products based on the Fermi architecture hitting the market soon.

The key new features for the open beta include:

Nsight Debugger:

• NVIDIA Fermi architecture support for debugging CUDA C source code.
• Improved parallel debugging visualizations for DirectX 10 HLSL debugging.

Nsight Analyzer:

• OpenCL 1.0 call trace visualization correlated to CPU+GPU events on the timeline.
• Timeline visualization of DirectX 11 API calls.
• CUDA Profiler support for Fermi hardware counters.

Nsight Graphics Inspector:

• DirectX11 Frame Debugging.
• DirectX11 Frame Profiling, with per-draw call bottleneck detection.
• Pixel History fully supported for Tesla (coming soon for Fermi).

With these additions, Parallel Nsight makes programming the GPU, for both computing and graphics applications, accessible within the workflow of Microsoft Visual Studio.

Parallel Nsight supports Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems and full integration within Microsoft Visual Studio (2008 SP1 standard edition or later). The beta 2 version of Parallel Nsight supporting DirectX 11 is scheduled to be available in less than a month, with the first full production release scheduled for June. Both standard and professional versions of NVIDIA Parallel Nsight will be available upon final release.

For more information, visit NVIDIA’s Nsight site.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.