The first quarter of 2022 has gone by, so let’s talk about what the Graphics team has been up to!

On this blog post we talk about:

• Hiring
• New Features

We’re hiring!

We still have a lot of PM and SWE roles open for several teams in Graphics! Check out aka.ms/graphicsjobs for a full list of our open jobs – we look at every application that we get. We also have several new roles since our previous blog update!

Have any questions about any of the roles? Please get hold of us at discord.gg/DirectX

New features

Optimizations for windowed games

Optimizations for windowed games (OWG) was released to the Windows Insider Program on February 16th. The new feature significantly improves latency on over 3000 games and is free for all gamers who upgrade to Windows 11. No developer work is required!

Windows HDR calibration app announced!

On 2/16 we announced publicly that the Xbox HDR Calibration app was coming to Windows. This app will allow users to improve color accuracy and consistency of their HDR display and improve their overall experience with HDR on Windows.

DirectStorage Public Release

The DirectStorage team publicly released the runtime for all developers to adopt into their games. We launched DirectStorage publicly through our blog, and AMD was also prepared with a blog post supporting our messaging.

DRR now expanded across more apps and new experiences

Back in June 2021, we announced Dynamic Refresh Rate (DRR). Now, Windows Insider Program users have access to new DRR experiences:

• When users move the mouse cursor, the system will now boost to 120Hz, making the PC feel more responsive.
• Touch and pen interactions blend into smooth animations in Windows UI and apps UI.
• Smooth scrolling is now supported not only in Office, but also in Microsoft Edge and Windows UI such as the Settings app.
  • To enable smooth scrolling on Edge you need to enter the following in the address bar of a new tab: “edge://flags/#edge-refresh-rate-boost-on-scroll”, set the highlighted flag to ‘Enabled’ and then restart Edge.

Color profile in quick settings

Windows Insider Program users are now able to select a color profile directly in quick settings without having to go into the Display settings to make this change.

All OpenGL apps now work on ARM!

We’ve officially removed the allow list from the retail version of the OpenCL™ and OpenGL® Compatibility Pack in the Microsoft Store, that previously limited OpenCL and OpenGL API support to just Adobe Photoshop on ARM.

With this release, other popular OpenGL applications such as Blender, Expresii, and Autodesk are now able to run on ARM devices.

PIX on Windows ships Export to C++!

PIX on Windows is Microsoft’s DX12 debugging and profiling tool, giving developers the ability to capture and analyze frames in their game. Export to C++ is a new feature that lets developers do more with their captures, by letting developers export a PIX capture as set of C++ files that do the captured work.

If you’re a dev and you want to share a local repro of a bug that you think is caused by either Microsoft or an IHV, it’s way simpler today: Export to C++ literally makes doing this as simple as a press of a button, instead of asking devs to create local repros themselves within complex game engines.

Export to C++ is also really useful for experimentation. If you’re a dev with a capture in front of you and you wanted to do experiments to see what could do to, for example, change the perf characteristics of the work in front of you, Export to C++ makes doing this a lot easier.

For more, see here.

PIX on Windows supports DirectStorage on Day 1

New features need new tooling support! The very same day that we announced DirectStorage and released our first publicly available DirectStorage nuget package, we announced and shipped a new version of PIX with dedicated support for the new API.