With its new DirectX preview for Windows 11, Microsoft wants to tackle one of the most troublesome problems in PC gaming: GPU crashes that are difficult to understand, and sometimes impossible to reproduce. Thanks to DirectX Dump Files, currently in preview for developers, Windows could generate an exploitable file when a TDR occurs (Timeout Detection and Recovery), that is to say when the graphics processor of the machine stops responding and must be reset to avoid blocking the entire computer.
The goal of this approach is to give studios more clues to determine whether the problem is with the game engine, graphics driver, graphics card, or player configuration.
The black box of GPU crashes
DirectX Dump Files take the form of a .dxdmp file generated when a TDR occurs. The latter can contain information from several levels of the graphics stack: hardware state, drivers, Direct3D runtime, Windows graphics core, but also data added by the game itself thanks to new D3D12 APIs (up to 2 MB of customizable data). Everything can then be analyzed in PIX, the Microsoft tool intended for graphics developers.
