D3D12 Support
=============

This page documents the support of D3D12 in RenderDoc. This gives an overview of what RenderDoc is capable of, and primarily lists information that is relevant. You might also be interested in the :doc:`full list of features <../getting_started/features>`.

Performance notes
-----------------

D3D12 is intended as to have low CPU overhead and be fully threadable, and RenderDoc strives to maintain that performance as much as possible. While some overhead is inevitable RenderDoc aims to have no locks on the 'hot path' of command buffer recording, minimal or no allocation, and in general to have low performance overhead while not capturing.

Some patterns of access are more or less conducive to good performance on RenderDoc, so if you are having trouble with slow capture, large memory/disk overhead or slow replay you might want to try eliminating use of persistent maps of resources. If you do have persistent maps, ensure that either the memory allocation is small or that you have only a few queue submits during the frame - since RenderDoc must compare the whole allocation at every submit to determine what might have changed and save out the delta.

Likewise try to avoid making very large memory allocations in the range of 1GB and above. By its nature RenderDoc must save one or more copies of memory allocations to enable proper capture, so having allocations limited to only a few 100s of megabytes can help gain granularity of management and limit the memory overhead RenderDoc adds. There may be optimisation of this in future on RenderDoc's side but there are no easy guarantees.

Current support
---------------

RenderDoc has initial support for D3D12, but it contains some caveats. In addition, not all replay features are currently supported, but this will eventually reach parity with other APIs.

* RenderDoc assumes that even if multiple GPUs are present, that only one will be used - i.e. NodeMask is always 0. Multiple queues are supported.
* RenderDoc captures may not be portable between different systems, only currently supporting capture and replay on the same or similar enough machines.
* Reserved resources are not supported.
* Pixel history is not implemented.
* Shader debugging is not currently supported.

DXIL support
------------

Currently DXIL is not supported. RenderDoc uses the standard functionality through ``ID3D12Device::CheckFeatureSupport`` to report that SM6 is unsupported, and a valid application must check this before creating PSOs that use DXIL code since not all versions of Windows 10 support DXIL either.

If such a PSO is detected, RenderDoc will display an overlay message to that effect and prevent capturing.

See Also
--------

* :doc:`../getting_started/features`
