Microsoft Open-Sources DxTimingCaptureLibrary for DirectX GPU Profiling

Microsoft released DxTimingCaptureLibrary on September 30, 2026 as an open-source C++ library under the MIT license. The DirectX team says it works on Windows 10 and Windows 11 and is intended to make DirectX Event Tracing for Windows data easier to consume in tools such as in-engine game profilers.

The library comes from code used by PIX Timing Captures. Microsoft says the DirectX data shown in the PIX Timing Capture interface is available through DxTimingCaptureLibrary, but the release is not PIX itself: developers provide the ETW session and consume the interpreted data through callbacks in their own tooling.

DirectX components including the D3D12 runtime, DXGI and the DirectX kernel already emit ETW events. The difficult part for a custom profiler is interpreting and correlating events from multiple providers. DxTimingCaptureLibrary packages that interpretation layer and calls application-defined interfaces when relevant data becomes available.

That makes the release primarily developer infrastructure. It does not increase game frame rates by itself, change the DirectX rendering pipeline, or automatically eliminate stutter. Its value is that engine and performance teams can integrate richer Windows graphics telemetry into the tools they already use to diagnose timing, residency, compilation and presentation behavior.

Microsoft's announcement includes a basic logging sample that can focus on DirectX residency and paging, a D3D12 journal sample that reports runtime failures, and a Perfetto sample that converts GPU timing callbacks into a trace connecting GPU command-list work with CPU-side markers. A memory-treemap sample is also described as work in progress.

The high-level integration flow is to configure an ETW session with the needed DirectX events, route those events to the library's handler, implement the callback interfaces relevant to the tool, and consume the callbacks as matching events arrive.

PC graphics debugging spans the application, D3D12, drivers, memory residency, storage and the Windows graphics kernel. A reusable Microsoft-supported interpretation layer lowers the amount of ETW-specific plumbing an engine team needs before it can reason about those layers together.

The release also fits Microsoft's broader 2026 push to improve Windows GPU developer tooling. DxTimingCaptureLibrary is narrower than features such as DirectX Dump Files: it focuses on turning timing and related ETW telemetry into data that custom tools can consume, while crash-dump workflows target post-failure GPU diagnosis.