Nsight

Nsight is a brand of development tools from Nvidia designed for debugging and profiling GPU-accelerated applications. The Nsight family encompasses tools for both graphics and compute workloads, providing performance analysis, correctness verification, and optimization guidance for GPU-accelerated software.

The core components include Nsight Visual Studio Edition for Windows, which integrates CUDA and graphics debugging into the Visual Studio environment; Nsight Eclipse Edition for Linux-based development; Nsight Compute, a CUDA kernel profiler; Nsight Systems, a system-wide performance analyzer; and Nsight Graphics, a graphics debugger and profiler for APIs such as DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. Some tools are standalone while others integrate into integrated development environments to provide detailed traces, API call information, shader and kernel debugging, memory analysis, and hardware-counter data.

Nsight supports multiple APIs and frameworks, notably CUDA for compute workloads and the principal graphics APIs DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. The tools help developers analyze CPU–GPU interactions, GPU memory usage, kernel occupancy, and rendering or compute bottlenecks. They are used to optimize game engines and rendering pipelines, scientific simulations, and other GPU-accelerated applications, including AI and machine learning workloads that leverage GPU acceleration.

Nsight tools are available on Windows and Linux and receive regular updates aligned with CUDA toolkit releases and major graphics API updates. They are part of Nvidia’s broader suite of developer tools, aimed at providing end-to-end visibility into GPU performance throughout development and deployment.