RenderDoc

Probably familiar to any TA or Engineer who deals with their graphics pipeline, RenderDoc is a tool I have found incredibly useful for debugging graphics in Unreal.

Formerly a Crytek internal graphics debugging tool, it was released to the public in 2014. The tool is developed by Baldur Karlsson, and it boggles my mind that a tool this gosh-darn useful has been given to the public for free. Kudos to Baldur and to Crytek.

Previously I was using NVIDIA Nsight to view and debug runtime atlased textures, and it was quite slow and somewhat unintuitive to sift through the outputs to find what I was after.

RenderDoc on the other hand is not only fairly straight forward to get running, the turn around time to get meaningful output for frame-debugging is extremely rapid.

For Ue4 integration I'm using Temaran's RenderDoc Ue4 plugin, which makes frame captures in game as simple as entering a command on the command line- RenderDoc.CaptureFrame

Check it out if you need to know more about your graphics pipeline.