One of the hard things to do in DirectX applications is determine the cause of a visual glitch or bug on the screen. Despite the best efforts of developers to avoid bugs, there are many websites featuring screenshots taken by gamers of weird things happening in a game.

Visual Studio addresses some of the debugging issues for DirectX applications by including a new Graphics Diagnostics toolset that lets you look at pixel history to determine just how a specific pixel came to be rendered on the screen. Let's see how it works.