Nsight Aftermath SDK

NVIDIA Nsight Aftermath SDK

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Aftermath is a library that integrates into a D3D12 or Vulkan game’s crash reporter to generate GPU “mini-dumps” when an exception or TDR occurs, exposing pipeline information to resolve an unexpected crash.


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Nsight Aftermath SDK

Capture GPU Pipeline Exceptions

Nsight Aftermath SDK generates a GPU “mini-dump” file from a live graphics application, containing detailed information about the GPU pipeline. This pipeline data can help reveal why an exception was triggered. GPU mini-dumps provide debugging information for the immediate issue, and an artifact for tracking problematic trends and patterns.

Integrate into Applications

The Nsight Aftermath SDK is flexible, built to work in conjunction with existing crash reporters. It can be integrated into user applications to allow important debugging information to be collected and processed by workflows that are already established. The granularity that Nsight Aftermath SDK captures at the moment of GPU failure makes crash reporters more assistive to resolving errors.

Visualize in Nsight Graphics

The GPU “mini-dump” files generated by Nsight Aftermath can be loaded into Nsight Graphics for a rich visualization of the data. Nsight Graphics will automatically display GPU State information and can isolate the specific line of shader source code that caused an exception.


Explore Key Features


Nsight Aftermath SDK library

Visualize GPU State

Nsight Aftermath gives you the ability to see detailed information about the GPU at the time of an exception. This includes what warps were running, the status of various GPU subunits and details about the faulting unit, as well as the execution state for markers you inserted in the frame.

Nsight Aftermath Monitor and Nsight Graphics integration

Enhanced MMU Fault Correlation

The GPU frequently accesses memory, which is processed by a hardware unit called the MMU, or Memory Management Unit. Often, when memory operations fail, no contextual data is left to help locate and resolve the issue. Debugging shouldn’t happen in the dark; Nsight Aftermath addresses MMU faults by exposing the shader source code that caused a faulty memory access.

 MMU fault correlation identifying problematic line of source code

Crash Monitoring with Nsight Graphics

The latest version of Nsight Aftermath is packaged with Nsight Graphics, so the tools can be used in conjunction. The Nsight Aftermath Monitor–included in both the SDK and Nsight Graphics–is the command center for collecting crash information. It can be extended by the Aftermath API to collect additional data like user markers and application specific meta data.

Application Integration

The Nsight Aftermath SDK contains headers and a library to integrate GPU mini-dump retrieval into your application. You can also explore this GitHub repository to access sample code, and an example dump file that can be viewed in Nsight Graphics.

View Other Tools Within the Nsight Suite

Nsight Aftermath SDK is part of the NVIDIA Nsight Developer Tools suite—a collection of powerful tools, libraries, and SDKs that enable developers to build, debug, and profile software utilizing the latest accelerated computing hardware.


Learn More About Nsight Tools


Nsight Graphics

NVIDIA Nsight Graphics is a standalone developer tool with ray-tracing support that enables you to debug, profile, and export frames built with Direct3D, Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenVR, and the Oculus SDK.

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Nsight Systems

NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool designed to visualize an application’s algorithms, help you identify the largest opportunities to optimize, and tune to scale efficiently across any quantity or size of CPUs and GPUs.


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Nsight Compute

Nsight Compute

Nsight Compute is an interactive kernel profiler for CUDA applications. It provides detailed performance metrics and API debugging via a user interface and command-line tool. It also provides a customizable, data-driven user interface and metric collection that can be extended with analysis scripts for post-processing results.


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