Announcing AgilitySDK 721 Preview and an addition to LinAlg in Shader Model 6.10

Overview

Today, we are pleased to announce Agility SDK 1.721-preview with new D3D features along with DXC 1.10.2605.4 adding VectorAccumulate to LinAlg in the existing Shader Model 6.10 preview.  The previous 1.720-preview and SM 6.10 preview blog is still relevant, as all of its features are available here too.

Here are the new features.  More detail is further below as well as download and driver links.

• LinAlg VectorAccumulate
  • Addition to existing LinAlg support in SM 6.10 preview
• Partial Programs
• GUID Texture Layout
• UAVs of Depth

Downloads

• AgilitySDK 1.721-preview: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx12agility/
• DXC 1.10.2605.4: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/releases

Drivers

See Appendix > Feature Support for the full table of each feature’s supported hardware.

The WARP software device supports all these features as well: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Direct3D.WARP/1.65535.20-preview

Features

HLSL LinAlg VectorAccumulate

The latest preview release of the DXC compiler adds support for the remaining LinAlg operation, VectorAccumulate. It is documented in the LinAlg spec. It also resolves several LinAlg preview bugs.

See the full release notes here: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/releases/tag/v1.10.2605.24

Partial Programs

Some game titles have a huge number of unique PSO combinations that they need to be compiled before the game loads to avoid stutter. Precompiling these PSO heavy titles in advance for many different hardware configurations for distribution through advanced shader delivery would take a significant amount of time and create duplicate effort. To address this, we are creating partial graphics programs. Partial graphics programs split the pipeline creation into two steps: create partial pre-rasterization and pixel shader programs containing common state used by different graphics pipelines, then link them together in a generic program with other state.

See this dedicated blog post for more about this feature: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/partial-graphics-programs/

GUID Texture Layout

D3D12 GUID Texture Layout is an extensible mechanism that lets applications specify exact texture memory layouts via standardized public or vendor-specific private GUIDs (extending D3D12_TEXTURE_LAYOUT), enabling predictable, contiguous, CPU-accessible layouts (e.g., row-major NV12) that improve performance and power efficiency in scenarios like camera/video processing pipelines.

Spec here: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Specs/tree/master/d3d/D3D12GUIDTextureLayout.md

UAVs of Depth

With this Agility SDK update and supporting driver you can now create Unordered Access Views (UAV) of Depth Stencil resources, enabling direct read/write access to both the depth and stencil planes.

Spec here: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Specs/tree/master/d3d/D3D12UAVofDepthBuffer.md

DXDump Files

This release includes some additional functionality for DirectX Dump Files, but there is no way to use it just yet. Stay tuned for updates about this in the coming weeks.

PIX

PIX supports all features released here. See the PIX release blog: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/pix/pix-2605-28-preview/

Appendix

Feature Support

Given drivers described in Overview > Drivers:

The WARP software device supports all these features as well.