“Building a Graphics Debugger”

While the dream of a graphics debugger on par with GDB or Visual Studio is one of the better sorts of dreams to have, there are many difficult challenges involved in making that dream a reality. Some of these challenges are fundamental to the task of graphics debugging while others are the result of drivers, shaders and hard-ware being designed with little thought to the graphics debugging process. While adding additional detail to our SIGGRAPH paper on this subject [Duca et al. 2005] is one of our goals, we also want to show how well current systems work with the basic paradigm of graphics debugging. As will be clear, some graphics systems and programming models put up hurdles that, if removed, would go a long way toward simplifying the design of a graphics debugger.

Duca, N., et al. 2005. A relational debugging engine for the graphics pipeline. SIGGRAPH.