For compute developers working in Eclipse development environment, please see Nsight Eclipse Edition

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition is an application development environment for heterogeneous platforms which brings GPU computing into Microsoft Visual Studio. NVIDIA® Nsight™ VSE allows you to build and debug integrated GPU kernels and native CPU code as well as inspect the state of the GPU and memory.

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Version 2024.3 New Features | Revision History

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition is freely offered through the NVIDIA Registered Developer Program and as part of the CUDA Toolkit


Debugging in Optix Applications in Nsight Visual Studio Edition

Gallery

Nsight Visual Studio Edition CUDA Debugger Key Features

  • Debug your CUDA C/C++ source code directly on the latest GPU hardware
  • Debug native Visual Studio CPU and CUDA GPU code within the same debugging session
  • Use the familiar Visual Studio Locals, Watches, Memory and Breakpoints windows
  • Inspect the CUDA kernel state using customs views for GPU registers, warps, lanes, and threads for navigating massively parallel threads states and contexts

Nsight Visual Studio Edition CUDA Debugger Watch Window

  • View Source variables, PTX & SASS registers in Locals & Watch Views
  • Expressions supported in Watch view
  • Updated variables are displayed with red font
  • Struct/Vector/Array contents display on a single line
  • Array max length settings
  • Error messages for out-of-scope or invalid expressions

Nsight Visual Studio Edition CUDA Debugger Source Code View

  • View correlated Source, PTX, and SASS
  • Set breakpoints in Source and/or SASS
  • Step over, in, out, continue in source or PTX/SASS disassembly
  • Conditional breakpoints operate on source vars and PTX/SASS regs
  • Hover over variables and registers to view values

Nsight Visual Studio Edition CUDA Debugger Breakpoints View

  • Supported Breakpoints for Native(CPU) and CUDA C/C++ code, including
    Source, SASS, Function, Conditional, Data
  • Full GPU and CPU State provided while at breakpoint
  • Process and Thread selection available
  • Conditional breakpoints operate on source vars and PTX/SASS regs

Nsight Visual Studio Edition CUDA Debugger Warp Info View

  • Warp Info shows the active warps on the GPU, one warp per row
  • Arrow indicates the in-focus thread, providing state for the rest of the views
  • Focus warp (row) or thread can be changed with a mouse click to provide further state inspection (unless warp is unlaunched/done)
  • Various ‘Freeze Modes’ to for run control of other warps
  • Warps are color coded to indicate their state
  • Filtering can be done to minimize warp results
  • Columns Not shown (PC, ActiveMask, HitMask, Status)

Nsight Visual Studio Edition CUDA Debugger GPU Registers View

  • Inspect PTX, SASS, Predicate, Conditional, and Uniform registers at this configurable GPU Register view
  • Visual Studio register view can also be configured to show GPU registers
  • This view can be configured to hide/show registers sets
  • Always hides registers that are not supported by the architecture (Not a Turing GPU, so no Uniform registers shown)
  • Can select and copy-to-clipboard
  • Red text indicates updated values

More NVIDIA DevTools Visual Studio Integration

NVIDIA Nsight Integration (highlighted) under the Nsight menu


NVIDIA Nsight Developer Tools Integration for Visual Studio

In Nsight VSE 2020.1.1, the integrated Graphics Frame Debuggers and integrated Profilers have been removed, but don't worry, you haven't lost this functionality.
NVIDIA Nsight Integration is a Visual Studio extension that allows you to access the power of the following NVIDIA Nsight standalone tools from within Visual Studio.

When any of these tools are installed along with NVIDIA Nsight Integration, these tools will appear under the NVIDIA 'Nsight' menu in the Visual Studio menu bar.

More Nsight Visual Studio Edition Information