Counters

PIX contains a number of counters for collecting and displaying information. The counters are configured in a experiment file to capture information while your target program is running.

Selecting Counters for an Experiment Using the Basic View - Choosing counters for an experiment using the basic view is pretty simple.
Selecting Counters for an Experiment Using the Advanced View - Choosing counters for an experiment using the advanced view gives you much more flexibility on the data you collect.

Selecting Counters for an Experiment Using the Basic View

If you are using a basic view, there is only one data gathering option that supports counter selection and that is to collect statistics for each frame. Select this option and the Draw_Submission counter set will appear in the dialog box.

Click on the drop-down arrow to display the counter options.

There are several choices.

Draw_Submission - Count API call associated with rendering.
Initial_Run - Count basic events, suitable for running a target program for the first time.
IO_Pass - Count the events associated with reading and writing resource data.
Resource_Usage - Count the events associated with using resources.

Selecting Counters for an Experiment Using the Advanced View

An advanced view is designed to allow you to customize the counters you use to collect data. To customize the counters from the advanced view, open the counter view, by clicking on the customize button in the triggers and actions tab.

The top half shows all the available counters and the counters you have selected for your experiment. Select a counter from the left side and use the Add button to add it to the list of chosen counters; select a counter from the right side and use the Remove button to remove it from the list of chosen counters.

Counter Sets

Notice that when you select a counter from the available counters list (such as Direct3D counters, that many counters are displayed in the chosen counters list. This is because each of the available counters is actually a group of counters called a counter set. Each of the data gathering options in the basic view use a predefined counter set to collect data. An advanced view lets you specify individual counters, or sets of counters or both.

PIX supports the following counter sets.

Direct3D Counters - Report information specifically about Direct3D.
Performance Counters - Report overall performance information.
Plug-in Counters - Report custom information, returned by third party plug ins.

Direct3D Counters

Direct3D counters keep track of Direct3D API calls.

General - Simple metrics including frames per second, and number of calls per frame.
Primitives - Count the number of draw calls.
Resources - Keep track of memory allocation and object creation.
State Changes - Count the number of state changes.
Shader Constant Changes - Count the number of shader constants.

Performance Counters

Performance counters track overall performance of the target program.

There are several to choose from.

Plug-in Counters

PIX supports third party plug-ins with custom counter sets. A third party plug-in must be created in a separate DLL. See the sample program PIXPluginSample (in SDK root)\Samples\C++\Misc\PixPluginSample) for an example of how to create a plug-in.

Creating Custom Counter Sets

If you choose to create your own counter set, go into the Counters dialog, choose the counters you want, and click Save As Counterset... After naming it, your counter set will appear in My CounterSets.

The first time PIX runs, it uses the four default counter sets you see here. At anytime, you can rename or remove counter sets by right clicking on the counter set and selecting the appropriate action.