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 redefine graphical immersion in Windows games. 

DirectX Raytracing 1.2: Game-Changing Performance Boosts  Copy link

DXR 1.2 introduces two revolutionary technologies: opacity micromaps (OMM) and shader execution reordering (SER), both of which deliver substantial leaps in raytracing performance: 

• Opacity micromaps significantly optimize alpha-tested geometry, delivering up to 2.3x performance improvement in path-traced games. By efficiently managing opacity data, OMM reduces shader invocations and greatly enhances rendering efficiency without compromising visual quality. 
• Shader execution reordering offers a major leap forward in rendering performance — up to 2x faster in some scenarios — by intelligently grouping shader execution to enhance GPU efficiency, reduce divergence, and boost frame rates, making raytraced titles smoother and more immersive than ever. This feature paves the way for more path-traced games in the future. 

For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s a sneak peek from our GDC presentation today – the recording of the full talk will be available in the GDC Vault and freely available shortly after on the Microsoft Game Dev channel.  

We’re thrilled that our hardware partners are fully embracing these cutting-edge features. NVIDIA has committed driver support across GeForce RTX™ GPUs, and we’re actively working with other hardware vendors, including AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, to ensure widespread adoption. 

Powerful Updates to PIX  Copy link

As always, we will have day-one support for DXR 1.2 in our DirectX debugger and profiler, PIX on Windows. Additionally, at GDC we announced other fantastic additions to our tooling story. These unlock more flexibility than ever before, giving developers powerful new ways to customize PIX to meet their needs. The improvements include: 

• PIX API Preview: A brand-new API giving developers programmatic access to PIX functionality and data via a D3D12-like API, available in C++, C# and Python. A private preview is coming in April 2025. 
• Custom Visualizers: Building on announcements over the past year, we announced new functionality to give unprecedented customization while viewing buffers, meshes, and textures inside the PIX UI. 
• PIX UX Refresh: A modernized, more intuitive, and more discoverable user experience is coming to PIX in April 2025! The many improvements include a new Visual Studio-like layout editor system, unlocking more PIX UI customization than ever before. 

Cooperative Vectors & Neural Rendering: Next-Generation Realism  Copy link

At Monday’s Advanced Graphics Summit session on neural rendering, we shared more details of our support for cooperative vectors. Cooperative vectors are a brand-new programming feature coming soon in Shader Model 6.9. It introduces powerful new hardware acceleration for vector and matrix operations, enabling developers to efficiently integrate neural rendering techniques directly into real-time graphics pipelines. 

With help on stage from our partners at Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, we highlighted key use cases for the technology: 

• Neural Block Texture Compression is a new graphics technique that dramatically reduces memory usage, while maintaining exceptional visual fidelity. Overall, our partners at Intel shared that by leveraging cooperative vectors to power advanced neural compression models, they saw a 10x speed up in inference performance. 
• Real-time path tracing can be enhanced by neural supersampling and denoising, combining two of the most cutting-edge graphics innovations to provide realistic visuals at practical performance levels. 
• NVIDIA unveiled that their Neural Shading SDK will support DirectX and utilize cooperative vectors, providing developers with tools to easily integrate neural rendering techniques, significantly improving visual realism without sacrificing performance. 

Thank you to our Industry Partners  Copy link

We want to express our gratitude to our valued industry partners, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and the incredible game developers at Remedy, who worked closely with us to present the future of graphics and shape these groundbreaking technologies.  

In particular, we would like to thank AMD’s Max Oberberger, who showcased the power of work graphs with mesh nodes. After last year’s GDC announcement of this feature, Max put work graphs through its paces and shared a demo in our talk, as well as a talk of his own in the Advanced Graphics Summit. Check out the video once it is available on the GDC Vault or the Microsoft Game Dev channel! 

Finally, our gratitude to our co-presenter on DirectX Raytracing 1.2, Remedy’s CTO Mika Vehkala. The team at Remedy was instrumental in providing early feedback and validating performance improvements with OMMs and SER, as well as being the first to integrate these features into an Alan Wake II demo showcasing our joint efforts at GDC. Thank you for representing Remedy on stage with us, Mika! 

Developers, Bring Next-Gen Gaming to Life!  Copy link

We’re inviting all developers to leverage these powerful new capabilities. DXR 1.2, cooperative vectors, and enhanced PIX tooling will be available in a preview Agility SDK coming in late April 2025.  

Share your questions or thoughts with the team on Discord.