Developers, using PhysX SDK, should be familiar with AgPerfMon – event-logging and profiling tool for PhysX SDK based applications on Windows platform, originally developed by Ageia. We also have used AgPerfMon a lot, for example during our “Mafia II is not using GPU for PhysX Clothing simulation ?” investigation.

Recently, NVIDIA has released NVIDIA Platform Analyzer 1.1 (NPA) profiler, that is basically recompiled AgPerfMon tool, with some bug-fixes and enhanced interface.

However, according to our information, NV Platform Analyzer won’t live long – PhysX Visual Debugger will handle all profiling and debugging work for PhysX SDK 3.x (currently – only SDK 3.0), upcoming last version of PhysX SDK 2.8.x (probably, 2.8.5) and will support not only PC, but consoles as well.

NVIDIA Platform Analyzer 1.1 Downloads:

NPA x84

NPA x64

NPA Readme

Source: Geeks3D forums

Another update has arrived for PhysX Visual Debugger – debugging application for capturing and analyzing data from PhysX SDK scene.

UPDATE [15.04.2011]: PhysX Visual Debugger 2.0.9 was uploaded, however, it seems that release notes are covering only changes in 2.0.8. version.

*** 12-17-2010 ***

• !Fixed bug where lead developer wasn’t updating the release notes like he should have been!
• Added three large new features, clips, annotations, and profile information.
• Made camera movement work better with non-y up axis configurations.
• Clips and a project system.  You can now split and crop a large capture arbitrarily to create clips. These are all stored together with the project and should allow users to reduce the size of the dataset they are dealing with when they have a large capture. You can also toggle active recording while PVD is capturing. Non-recorded data is of course discarded, each recorded section gets placed into a new clip.
  So we have two use cases supported, the first is to just capture everything then trim out parts that you don’t need. The second is to toggle the recording during capture to trim out things you don’t need at the source.
• Profiling information is now available for 3.0 datasets on any platform where pvd is supported. New profile view.  View the profiling information captured for one physx frame at a time.
• Right click and graph any event over the course of the clip.
• Annotations allow users to mark portions of the presentation where something interesting happens. They save the application state (camera, current frame, etc) and have an arbrary name and description field.  This allows devs to communicate with the physx team and each other specific problems (frame X, dude walks through wall here.  Frame Y, box falls through floor). Ctrl-alt-A is your friend, along with the profile view.
• 3.0 physx scenes allow pausing just like 2.8 did.  So you can pause a running 3.0 scene.  This works because every actual scene object captures and releases a mutex every frame (at the beginning of the simulate call).  So we won’t pause your application if you are running physx in separate threads than the render or game thread; we will definitely hang the physx related threads while PVD is paused, however.  You can toggle pause during recording by hitting the space bar.

Clips and Annotations information change the nature of PVD to more of a tool that you can capture a dataset with and work in it for a while as well as send the project around for multiple people to comment on various aspects of the capture.

Profiling is already quite useful but is rough and could use feedback around more use cases.

You can download PhysX Visual Debugger 2.0.8 via Developer Support Center.

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

New 2.0 version of PhysX Visual Debugger, object-based database application for analyzing captured data from PhysX engine, was updated to version 2.0.6. Beta.

Update: final 2.0.6. version released – no differences from PVD 2.0.6 Beta though

[20.08.10] Update #2: PVD 2.0.7. with minor bugfixes is available for download.

Release Notes:

• Lots of optimizations during capture!  Capturing should be even quicker and more painless than it was with the first beta.
• Lots of UI bugfixing specifically to the tree views (All Objects, Selected Objects, Watched Objects).  They should be more stable and much more user friendly especially when selecting new objects.
• Navigation and selection were reversed.  So navigation is the default action while selection requires pressing ‘alt’.  You can quick select something by double clicking on it without pressing ‘alt’.
• Reversed the log file direction.  No more scrolling down; new errors at the top.
• New preferences dialog !  Much easier to use, no tabs.
• Got rid of the frames palette.  We are sorry it ever existed.  The playback controls got moved to the toolbar while the slider got moved to the bottom of the scene view.

And more interesting:

• Preliminary support for the 3.0 version PhysX !!!.  We are very excited about this.

Yep, we are excited about it too

You can download PhysX Visual Debugger 2.0.6 Beta via Developer Support Center.

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

PhysX Visual Debugger, debug tool for PhysX SDK based applications was updated to version 2.0.

Update: PhysX Visual Debugger 2.0.6 Beta

Current release notes are unknown, but it seems that PVD 2.0 was completely rebuild from scratch (upd: confirmed, it’s complete rewrite) – just take a look at the main application window (click to view full picture), and compare it with previous PVD 1.1.9

You can download PhysX Visual Debugger 2.0 Beta via Developer Support Center.

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

If you have trouble with new account registration or existing account (dissapearing downloads, unable to log-in, etc) you can send your problem description to support@physxinfo.com – we’ll try to provide a shortcut to PhysX dev. team.

PhysX Visual Debugger, debug and visualization tool for PhysX SDK based applications, was updated to version 1.1.9.

Main fix in this update – compability with PS3 version of PhysX SDK 2.8.3.

You can download PhysX Visual Debugger here

PhysX Visual Debugger, tool that allows you to visualize, debug, and interact with your PhysX SDK based applications, was updated to version 1.1.8. PVD supports the current PhysX SDK release (2.8.3 Version) and all previous versions.

Release notes
1. Support both left-handed and right-handed coordinate systems.
2. Fixed bug: The PVD crashes when a delete object operation is undone.
3. Fixed bug: The camera operations (Zoom to Fit, Center at the Selection, and Track the Selection) are working properly with groups of objects.
4. Fixed bug: The selection now works with cloth and soft bodies.
6. Fixed bug: Scrubbing back would sometimes fail.

You can download PhysX Visual Debugger here