Profiling Mode for Game OS titles changes the default memory allocation of a console at boot-time to move additional memory to profiling tools such as PIX by removing memory from the System OS. This enables profiling tools to place run-time allocations outside of the title memory space. Otherwise, titles would need to reserve scarce memory to enable profiling features.
Profiling Mode is focused entirely on Game OS titles. It is intended to be used when the title is running in Full-screen mode with no shared apps in Snap Mode. If you are co-developing shared apps with your exclusive app, we recommend that you profile your Game OS titles separately, then disable Profiling Mode before running your shared apps.
Because Profiling Mode is a boot-time change, changes to Profiling Mode are persistent and the console must be rebooted for any change to take effect. Profiling Mode can be set from within PIX or with the Configuration (xbconfig.exe) tool from the command line.
xbconfig ProfilingMode=on
xbconfig ProfilingMode=off
PIX will prompt to enable Profiling Mode whenever disabled PIX functionality is triggered. For example, when requesting a timing capture against a console with Profiling Mode disabled, PIX will prompt to enable Profiling Mode and then reboot the console. PIX requires Profiling Mode to be enabled on a console for full functionality. When Profiling Mode is not enabled, only the System Monitor and GPU capture features are supported, with the limitation that GPU captures require free memory in the title’s memory space to succeed. All other features of PIX requiring a remote console are disabled including timing captures and GPU capture analysis.