DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
D3D12 Cooperative Vector
Welcome to the preview release for Cooperative Vector support in D3D12. This exposes powerful new hardware acceleration for vector and matrix operations, enabling developers to efficiently drive neural rendering techniques directly from individual shader threads in real-time graphics pipelines. In research and in industry, machine learning based approaches have made their way to mainstream, replacing/augmenting traditional techniques. In graphics, neural network based rendering methods are gaining popularity over traditional methods of image reconstruction, texture compression, material shading etc. Simul...
D3D12 Opacity Micromaps
DirectX Raytracing (DXR) now supports Opacity Micromaps (OMMs), enabling hardware to handle alpha tested geometry more efficiently than relying only on costly AnyHit shader invocations. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including OMMs, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Recording. In the video, Remedy showed the performance wins they achieve using a synergistic combination of OMMs and Shader Execution Reordering in Alan Wake 2. Out of the gate all NVIDIA raytracing capable hardware supports OMMs (currently developer preview drivers). Over time additional hardwa...
D3D12 Shader Execution Reordering
Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is an addition to DirectX Raytracing that enables application shader code inform hardware how to find coherency across rays so they can be sorted to execute better in parallel. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including SER, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Recording. In the video, Remedy showed the performance wins they achieve using a synergistic combination of Opacity Micromaps (OMMs) and Shader Execution Reordering in Alan Wake 2. SER is designed such that when applications use it to give sorting hints to drivers, it is u...
Agility SDK 1.717-preview and 1.616-retail
We are pleased to announce both a retail and preview Agility SDK release with several new features, available on Agility SDK Downloads today! As usual, the features in this release come with Day One PIX support. Please read the PIX blog post for more information. Agility SDK 1.717-preview features Check out the full spec at D3D12 Video Encoding | DirectX-Specs. Agility SDK 1.616-retail features
HLSL Native and Long Vectors
Vectors have been supported as native primitive types in HLSL from the beginning. However, they have been limited to a maximum of 4 elements. This was reasonable for the use cases for which HLSL was designed as 3D vertices, 3D vectors, and RGBA colors can be fully represented using 4 scalar values or fewer. There are other applications in the machine learning (ML) space and for uses of vectors that don't directly map to these concepts that benefit from longer vectors. Sometimes they benefit from much longer vectors! These uses are principally, though not exclusively, through Cooperative Vectors. To meet the...
Announcing DirectX Raytracing 1.2, PIX, Neural Rendering and more at GDC 2025!Â
Today in the DirectX State of the Union at GDC 2025, we proudly showcased the next evolution in graphics with the announcement of DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2. This update promises groundbreaking performance improvements and breathtaking visual fidelity, marking another milestone in our mission to deliver immersive, realistic experiences to gamers everywhere. We also brought developers the latest and greatest in our DirectX tooling with updates to PIX. In partnership with industry leaders—including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, and game studios like Remedy—we demonstrated how these advancements are set to...
DirectX at GDC 2025
We’re counting down the days until the Microsoft DirectX team will be at the Game Developers Conference 2025 with a lineup of exciting sessions and announcements to push the boundaries of game development. Whether you’re a seasoned graphics developer or just diving into the world of DirectX, our sessions will offer valuable insights into the latest advancements in raytracing, PIX, neural rendering, and more. Mark your calendars and get ready for an inside look at the future of graphics with DirectX! DirectX State of the Union: Raytracing and PIX Workflows When: Thursday, March 20th 9:30am-10:30am Gain essent...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: New D3D12 Video Encode Features
Today DirectX 12 provides APIs to support GPU video encode acceleration for several applications, as detailed in D3D12 Video Encoding - Windows drivers | Microsoft Learn previous blog posts such as Announcing new DirectX 12 feature - Video Encoding! - DirectX Developer Blog. In this blog post we’re happy to announce a series of new features included in the Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview that provide more control to apps using the D3D12 Video Encode API. These new features help reduce latency and improve quality in several scenarios. New feature list Let’s take a look at each of t...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview & 1.615-retail: Shader hash bypass
The D3D runtime as of 1.615 officially supports applications opting to bypass shader hash validation. The historical purpose of the hash that the DX shader compiler embeds in every shader binary was to give the D3D runtime to confidence that shaders being given to it are well formed. The assumption was that a hashed shader likely came from an official compiler that ran its validator run on the code, and also that there was no memory corruption after that. These assumptions still apply by default. Meaning most developers that just want to use DXC to compile shaders and pass them to D3D can continue to do so,...