Today, we are pleased to announce that Shader Model 6.9 and other features have been officially released with Agility SDK 1.619 and complementary DXC 1.9.2602.16. Many of these features have been in preview status since 2025. Simultaneously, we are releasing a handful of new preview features in a separate preview runtime: Agility SDK 1.719-preview....

Now officially released, Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is an addition to DirectX Raytracing that enables application shader code inform hardware how to find coherency across rays so they can be sorted to execute better in parallel.  SER support is a required feature in Shader Model 6.9, meaning all drivers must accept shader code using SER....

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) now supports Opacity Micromaps (OMMs), enabling hardware to handle alpha tested geometry more efficiently than relying only on costly AnyHit shader invocations. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including OMMs, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Recording. In the video, Remed...

Welcome to the preview release for Cooperative Vector support in D3D12.  This exposes powerful new hardware acceleration for vector and matrix operations, enabling developers to efficiently drive neural rendering techniques directly from individual shader threads in real-time graphics pipelines. In research and in industry, machine learning ...

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) now supports Opacity Micromaps (OMMs), enabling hardware to handle alpha tested geometry more efficiently than relying only on costly AnyHit shader invocations. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including OMMs, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Recording. In the video, Remed...

Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is an addition to DirectX Raytracing that enables application shader code inform hardware how to find coherency across rays so they can be sorted to execute better in parallel. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including SER, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Record...

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 o...

Hi everyone, Today we’re excited to announce the newest Preview Agility SDK v1.715.0, download here. Since this is a preview SDK, the new features are not in final state and thus only available via Developer Mode within Windows (see the prerequisites section for more).  This preview serves as a first look to explore what might be possible...

This is the official release of D3D12 Work Graphs, enabling new types of GPU autonomy, originally available as a preview in 2023. To start, here's what Epic sees: With the proliferation of GPU-driven rendering techniques - such as Nanite in Unreal Engine 5 - the role of the CPU is trending towards primarily resource management and hazard ...

Work Graphs is now out of preview. See the launch blog here Contents Introduction to work graphs Work graphs are a system for GPU autonomy in D3D12. Given the increasing prevalence of general compute workloads on GPUs, the motivation is to address some l...