Metal Debugger Issues

Yes.

The gpu debugging tools have had numerous issues throughout OS releases.

The cause is merely quality assurance problems. - And it infects every corner of the company.

The way we can resolve it, is by raising standards, and making it clear to the staff that their current work is not acceptable.

If we say, it is not acceptable, and if they truly care and are not disingenuous, then the managers would then be more critical and reject more of the sloppy and half-baked work.

It means that the developer culture itself has to become more sincere about it's standards as well - so as to be more thorough before submitting work. A lot of this comes from the way people go about achieving the results - not just the results themselves. Accepting that there are formally right ways to do things, and that the current culture inside and outside the company is wrong, would be the first step we could do today. Beginning to practice the right ways are also things that can and should be done today, and not put off like, "It is a nice idea, but I don't feel like working that hard, and it doesn't matter that much, it is already quite good, so I wont do it that way today."

I often hear this and similar patterns, where the teams take attitudes of mind where they pat themselves on the back, and tell each other that it is good, and further validate themselves by positive reviews - (without taking into account the dynamics of reviews in a culture that is trying overly hard to be positive.)

As soon as the team says, "We think it is good and we worked very hard" - It is over in that very moment, they have blocked themselves from looking at the core problems and fixing them.

What we have to do, is be perfectly clear, that "No, it is not good. It is not meeting the minimum standard of quality", and that we have to provoke them to confront the reality of how bad things actually are, so that they will take them seriously enough to fix them.

Because the third party developers often don't complain as clearly, nor do we organize ourselves together to communicate effectively, and because the guys at the top of the company don't care enough, these problems will go on for years until we put our foot down and be more strict about what quality actually means, and how much we actually care to get it.

Works here with macOS 10.15.7, Xcode 12.2 and iOS 14.2.

What's your deployment target there? I think I had to raise it to iOS 12.0 for frame capturing to work with (real) iOS devices. Frame capturing is grayed out on iOS simulator here, but I guess that's simply not supported on the simulator, for whatever reason.

macOS 10.15 is the deployment target

Hi Maxwell,

Shader Debugger needs to be aligned with the macOS version. So Xcode 12's Shader Debugger will only run on macOS targets if you have Big Sur. You should be able to use the Shader Debugger in Xcode 12 for an iOS target on a Mac with Catalina so long as you have iOS 14 installed.

That said 11.7 should not crash. It unclear to me where the crash occurs, during Xcode launching or when you try the Shader Debugger on 11.7. In any case, can you create create a request via Feedback Assistant and post the FB number here? Include system information you can.

So unfortunately I will not be able to submit a debug request since I updated to Big Sur before seeing this post. However, I am happy to say that the debugger is working flawlessly in Xcode 12.3 with Big Sur 11.1.

Glad to hear it's working for you with Big Sur.