Mike Burrows - PIX, graphics performance analysis | scobleizer

Are you a DirectX game developer? Well, you might check out PIX, which stands for Performance Investigator for DirectX. Mike Burrows demonstrates the tool and how you'd use it on Windows games to profile your game's performance.

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Manip

Sep 04, 2005 at 7:36 PM

Sounds like a golden gift to any multiplayer game cheats... A built in graphics hack build right into Windows for them.
Manip

Sep 04, 2005 at 7:41 PM

Quality looks great to me...
scobleizer I'm the video guy

Sep 04, 2005 at 7:50 PM

I might have screwed that up, sorry. That's Steve Lacey. These were recorded at the Microsoft Meltdown conference.
Minh WOOH! WOOH!

Sep 05, 2005 at 8:20 AM

Manip wrote:

Sounds like a golden gift to any multiplayer game cheats... A built in graphics hack build right into Windows for them.

A tool that logs graphic calls golden gift for multi-player cheats? Hmm... How would you do that again?
andur

Sep 05, 2005 at 9:54 AM

Manip wrote:

Sounds like a golden gift to any multiplayer game cheats... A built in graphics hack build right into Windows for them.

Umm, there's absolutely no way that you could directly use pix to cheat in any game.
Plus, I believe there's something you can do to your program to prevent pix from grabbing information from it (can't remember what offhand). Though a quick test reveals that it does work with half life 2, profiled the main menu successfully. Though grabbing 293 frames of that simple scene took 165 mb.

That all said, pix is an amazing tool! I've used it several times to find performance problems in my own graphics engine and fixed them as a result.
moofish Living in Scotland, UK

Sep 05, 2005 at 3:35 PM

"sweet" "cool" etc I will say that the narator on this video really had an irritating voice
Manip

Sep 05, 2005 at 3:41 PM

Minh wrote:

Manip wrote: Sounds like a golden gift to any multiplayer game cheats... A built in graphics hack build right into Windows for them.

A tool that logs graphic calls golden gift for multi-player cheats? Hmm... How would you do that again?

Redirect output to null, redraw the scene on the display except minus the textures for the walls, giving you a nice shoot though walls cheap in CS. There is one example. How about glowing models via the same method? How about an aimbot via finding models using the graphics calls?
Nata1 .Search - Google Appliance killer

Sep 05, 2005 at 6:04 PM

didn't we already see the last half of this? I love that part btw

Minh WOOH! WOOH!

Sep 05, 2005 at 9:10 PM

Manip wrote:

Minh wrote:

Manip wrote: Sounds like a golden gift to any multiplayer game cheats... A built in graphics hack build right into Windows for them.

A tool that logs graphic calls golden gift for multi-player cheats? Hmm... How would you do that again?

Redirect output to null, redraw the scene on the display except minus the textures for the walls, giving you a nice shoot though walls cheap in CS. There is one example. How about glowing models via the same method? How about an aimbot via finding models using the graphics calls?

And you can do all this live? In real time? Anxiously waiting for your PIX cheat demo.

* Shoot through walls have nothing to do w/ null textures. Walls are data structures, not textures.
* See through walls are possible, though, Not sure how you would modify PIX to allow that.
* Aimbots exploit the network communication protocols, not graphic calls.