The 2201.24 version of PIX on Windows includes a new feature that uses the CPU context switch data collected during a Timing Capture to compute the critical path for a selected PIX event. The critical path is the series of events and thread dependencies that, if shortened, would reduce the overall duration of the selected event.
As an example, consider the following PIX event named MainLoop 17864. This event represents one frame of CPU time. In this frame, we can see where execution begins and ends, as represented by the dark blue boxes. However, there is also a significant portion of the frame drawn in a dim hatched color. This period of time represents a stall, or a period of time in which our main thread is not running.
