DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
Announcing DirectX Raytracing 1.2, PIX, Neural Rendering and more at GDC 2025!
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,...
AgilitySDK 1.716.0-preview and 1.615-retail
We are pleased to announce both a retail release of Shader hash bypass and a preview AgilitySDK release with several new features, available on Agility SDK Downloads today! You can find detailed information about all the features on the individual blog pages:
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: Application Specific Driver State
Today we’re excited to announce the release of a new D3D12 feature: Application Specific Driver State. This feature is intended to be used by capture/replay tools, such as PIX on Windows, to help with issues caused by “app detect” behavior. Background D3D12 drivers occasionally have to perform workarounds for bugs in specific applications. For example, this may occur if an older game shipped with a bug that only affects a new generation of GPUs. The driver may be forced to detect when the application is running and then perform an application-specific workaround for the bug. This behavior is often called "app d...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: Recreate At GPUVA
New Recreate At GPUVA Feature After months of effort from both our hardware partners and us, the D3D12 team is happy to announce the preview of the Recreate At GPUVA feature as part of its Agility SDK Downloads 1.716 release. This feature is mostly intended to be used by tooling developers, such as PIX, to simplify capturing and replaying of GPU workloads. The Problem: Resource allocation behaves much like malloc in C, there are no guarantees about what memory address is given to the caller. Within a single process this is usually fine, until the application starts recording these addresses into buffers and us...
Enabling Neural Rendering in DirectX: Cooperative Vector Support Coming Soon
Neural Rendering: A New Paradigm in 3D Graphics Programming In the constantly advancing landscape of 3D graphics, neural rendering technology represents a significant evolution. Neural rendering broadly defines the suite of techniques that leverage AI/ML to dramatically transform traditional graphics pipelines. These new methods promise to push the boundaries of what’s possible in real-time graphics. DirectX is committed to cross-platform enablement of neural rendering techniques, and cooperative vectors are at the core of this initiative. We are excited to share our plans to add cooperative vector support to...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: Tight Alignment of Resources
We’re pleased to announce that we have a new preview Agility SDK out today, letting developers try out the new Tight Alignment feature! You can find the NuGet package here. Background When placed resources were introduced in D3D12, there was an intentional decision to simplify alignment restrictions and take the greatest common denominator across the hardware ecosystem. There was a desire to migrate to tighter alignment across the ecosystem over time, but this hadn't happened yet. Since D3D12's launch, developers have noticed that it is actually pretty common to have numerous tiny resources (meaningfull...