DirectX Developer Blog

Moving Gears to Tier 2 Variable Rate Shading

Jacques van Rhyn January 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021 01/12/21

The team at The Coalition haven't stopped innovating since bringing Tier 1 VRS to Gears Tactics, and have brought Tier 2 VRS support to both Gears 5 and Gears Tactics.  The team saw similarly large perf gains from VRS Tier 2 - up to 14%! - this time with no noticeable visual impact. See for yourself if you can tell which side of the first ...

In the works: HLSL Shader Model 6.6

Greg Roth November 23, 2020 Nov 23, 2020 11/23/20

  Microsoft and its partners are happy to announce the development of Shader Model 6.6, the latest advancement in HLSL capability. Shader Model 6.6 will grant shader developers increased flexibility to enhance and expand existing rendering approaches and devise all new ones. New features include expanded atomic operations, ...

Announcing the OpenCL™ and OpenGL® Compatibility Pack for Windows 10 on ARM

Angela Jiang November 17, 2020 Nov 17, 2020 11/17/20

The OpenCL and OpenGL to DirectX 12 mapping layers are now available in the Microsoft Store as the OpenCL™ and OpenGL® Compatibility Pack. We’re excited to talk more about the project and share one specific use case: Photoshop on Windows 10 on ARM.

D3D12 Debug Layer Message Callback

Alex Gong October 19, 2020 Oct 19, 2020 10/19/20

Finally, D3D12 messages that you can easily integrate with your own application logs! The D3D12 InfoQueue Message Callback feature allows developers to capture debug messages, with stack context, providing yet another essential debugging tool for error analysis. To date, D3D12 has had ID3D12InfoQueue API. However, developers always wants there...

D3D12 Debug Object Auto-Naming

Bill Kristiansen October 16, 2020 Oct 16, 2020 10/16/20

As of Windows 10 Release Preview 20236, there is now an option to enable automatic naming of D3D12 objects. Debug Object Auto-Names are unique, and descriptive, and are easy to enable programmatically or using d3dconfig.

New in DirectX— Feature Level 12_2

Claire Andrews August 27, 2020 Aug 27, 2020 08/27/20

What’s a feature level? If you’re a game developer who has spent any amount of time with computer hardware, or perhaps a computer game which simulates working with it, you will know that graphics cards are not all the same. There’s differentiation. Differentiation not only of overall performance characteristics, but the kinds of ...

Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling

Steve Pronovost June 30, 2020 Jun 30, 2020 06/30/20

Abstract You may have noticed a mysterious new optional feature called Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling appear in the advanced graphics settings page with the Windows 10 May 2020 update. The purpose of this blog is to give some background on this new feature and how we are introducing it. It is intended for folks curious about Windows ...

Iterating on Variable Rate Shading in Gears Tactics

Jacques van Rhyn May 26, 2020 May 26, 2020 05/26/20

Gears Tactics is the very first game to ship with support for DirectX 12 Variable Rate Shading (VRS), one of the major features in DirectX 12 Ultimate. VRS let Gears Tactics achieve large performance gains – up to 18.9% (!) – on a wide range of hardware with a minimal impact on visual quality. Check out this guest post where Jacob ...