The October 2012 release of the Durango XDK from Microsoft contains the following new features, tools, and documentation.
For features that shipped in a previous Durango XDK release, see the What’s New document for that release.
The most recent release notes and Durango XDK updates can always be found on Durango Downloads on the Xbox Game Developer site. For access, log in with your ID and password on https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/games/xbox/partner/index; at the top of the page, point to Development and click Downloads.
The Durango developer support group sends e-mail to Durango developers whenever a new Durango XDK is released. Also, you can check with your account manager for the latest information about upcoming Durango XDK releases.
With the release of this XDK, versions of the Durango XDK before July 2012 are retired. We maintain download support for the three most recent releases of the XDK. You are encouraged, though, to update to each new release in order to get the most recent bug fixes and new features.
User-Mode Graphics Driver improvements
For this release, we have made a host of bug fixes and performance optimizations to the Durango User Mode driver. In particular, developers should note the following improvements:
We expect that you will notice a substantial improvement in overall functionality and performance in your applications due to the driver fixes in this release.
As a result of underlying changes to the Durango OS, beginning with the November 2012 Durango XDK release the legacy graphics driver will no longer be supported. Microsoft will continue to invest significantly in improvements to the Durango User Mode driver through launch. Because we need your feedback and reproduction steps to find and eliminate remaining performance issues and bugs, we strongly encourage all developers to use the Durango User Mode Driver instead of the legacy driver. Tell us what’s required to give Durango developers the right capabilities with the best possible performance.
New user interface improvements for PIX
For this release PIX now provides a way to analyze significantly more data at once, and a vastly improved way to view it. You can now open multiple frame captures simultaneously, enabling you to see events, resources, shaders and other PIX views for separate capture documents at the same time. This supports manual comparison of capture files for performance changes or to assist in debugging graphical issues.
In order to more easily manage all of these captures, you need more screen real-estate, so PIX now supports multiple monitors. You can drag and drop views from the main PIX interface to other monitors and flexibly arrange multiple collection of views to suit your needs.
You can also direct PIX to use a separate development kit for analysis than the one used for capture. This extends to multiple capture files; each open capture document can specify a different kit for analysis.
In addition, the events list now supports sorting and filtering. Events can be sorted ascending or descending by any counter column, and can be filtered by text string match or to GPU work events only. Together, this allows you to filter and sort by Draw calls with the longest measured duration, highlighting key rendering spikes in descending order.