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Well, not every system has a framebuffer, but here's a Carmack tweet that comes to mind:

"gl_FragColor.x = 1.0; is the printf of graphics debugging. Stone knives and bearskins."

— https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/568861553245...

He also seems to like a timing/GPU/CPU debugger called PIX from MS, I'm impressed. I wish they had started with the hands on, but the presenters in this video[0] all show why print debug will never be enough. Getting back to the OP, for me even IDE integrated debugging is worse than print debugs. You need to so much data to make it useful for me, which makes things like PIX, APM and other application tracers the thing I go for during debug.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH-o5cG_QWo

As a side note: While using wgpu-rs to do Rust game development, I grew very fond of RenderDoc (https://renderdoc.org/).

It has great Vulkan compatibility and it helped me greatly when building an object picking buffer by visualising everything from call trees to resource contents and metadata. I believe it should come in handy for any GPU-based project, not just 3D/2D graphics.

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