Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Learn how to debug shader issues like the complex bug in this video faster and more easily using Nsight Graphics’ new Shader Debugger. Jeff Kiel shows the full process of taking a complex bug — in this case, a lighting anomaly in a Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) pass — finding warps that show the issue, and quickly narrowing it down to its root cause.
Rendering engineers in game development and professional applications alike will find useful features in Nsight Graphics' Shader Debugger. Without it, shader debugging often consists of having to iteratively insert printf statements or output different debug colors, recompile shaders, re-run the application, and re-reproduce the issue with each new hypothesis. This can involve long iteration times, and inserting debugging shims into shaders can even affect how shaders operate, leading to dreaded "heisenbugs".
With Nsight, you can instead pause GPU execution and view warps as the shader runs, exactly as it runs on the GPU. Not only that, but you can also view source code and shader variables across many threads in parallel. And you can set breakpoints --- even conditional ones! Once you’ve found a bug, you can often edit your shader source code and view the changes in the output image without having to restart the application. With these tools at hand, shader debugging becomes much easier and less error-prone.
Jeff Kiel is a senior engineering manager at NVIDIA working on Developer Tools. He has been working with console, desktop, and pro-vis developers for more than a decade helping them debug and optimize their applications using the NVIDIA suite of tools. Before joining NVIDIA, Jeff had a career in game development for consoles and PCs.
📝 Tech blog: developer.nvidia.com/blog/shader-debugging-made-easy-with-nvidia-nsight-graphics
📥 Download: developer.nvidia.com/nsight-graphics
00:00 -- Nsight Overview
03:44 -- Debugging an SSAO Pass
11:36 -- Conclusion
#shaders #GameDev #computergraphics
Learn how to debug shader issues like the complex bug in this video faster and more easily using Nsight Graphics’ new Shader Debugger. Jeff Kiel shows the full process of taking a complex bug — in this case, a lighting anomaly in a Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) pass — finding warps that show the issue, and quickly narrowing it down to its root cause.
Rendering engineers in game development and professional applications alike will find useful features in Nsight Graphics' Shader Debugger. Without it, shader debugging often consists of having to iteratively insert printf statements or output different debug colors, recompile shaders, re-run the application, and re-reproduce the issue with each new hypothesis. This can involve long iteration times, and inserting debugging shims into shaders can even affect how shaders operate, leading to dreaded "heisenbugs".
With Nsight, you can instead pause GPU execution and view warps as the shader runs, exactly as it runs on the GPU. Not only that, but you can also view source code and shader variables across many threads in parallel. And you can set breakpoints --- even conditional ones! Once you’ve found a bug, you can often edit your shader source code and view the changes in the output image without having to restart the application. With these tools at hand, shader debugging becomes much easier and less error-prone.
Jeff Kiel is a senior engineering manager at NVIDIA working on Developer Tools. He has been working with console, desktop, and pro-vis developers for more than a decade helping them debug and optimize their applications using the NVIDIA suite of tools. Before joining NVIDIA, Jeff had a career in game development for consoles and PCs.
📝 Tech blog: developer.nvidia.com/blog/shader-debugging-made-easy-with-nvidia-nsight-graphics
📥 Download: developer.nvidia.com/nsight-graphics
00:00 -- Nsight Overview
03:44 -- Debugging an SSAO Pass
11:36 -- Conclusion
#shaders #GameDev #computergraphics
