The excitement is building as we head into the 2026 Game Developer Conference and the DirectX team has a lot to share. We will be showcasing major updates in asset streaming, GPU tooling, ML-powered real-time graphics on Windows, and shader compilation at GDC.  If you’re attending GDC, we’d love to see you in person. Below is a quick preview of ...

Olive is a powerful open-source Microsoft tool to optimize ONNX models for DirectML. You may remember from this year’s Build that we showcased Olive support for Stable Diffusion, a cutting-edge Generative AI model that creates images from text. We didn’t want to stop there, since many users access Stable Diffusion through Automatic1111's webUI, ...

At Inspire this year we talked about how developers will be able to run Llama 2 on Windows with DirectML and the ONNX Runtime and we've been hard at work to make this a reality. We now have a sample showing our progress with Llama 2 7B! See https://github.com/microsoft/Olive/tree/main/examples/directml/llama_v2 This sample relies on first ...

Text-to-image models are amazing tools that can transform natural language into stunning images. Stable Diffusion is particularly interesting: the base model can create images from text and, since it’s open-source, developers can customize it for their own needs and preferences. With some extra training, developers can fine-tune their model to gene...

We’ve published another Agility SDK, version 1.608.0.  This Agility SDK has support for Enhanced Barriers, and a few minor DX12 features. That’s right: these features no longer require developer mode to run on your machine! Head to Agility SDK Downloads to grab it. Enhanced Barriers For an overview of Enhanced Barriers, please see here for our...

We’re pleased to announce that we have two new Agility SDKs available today! Agility SDK 1.606.3 contains support for Shader Model 6.7, which we announced was in the works earlier this year. Today, Shader Model 6.7 is ready for you to try! We also have another preview Agility SDK out today: 1.706.3-preview, see here for our blog. In addition ...

We’re pleased to announce that we’re releasing our first Agility SDK preview today, Agility SDK version 1.700.10-preview! Head to Agility SDK Downloads to grab it. Agility SDK version 1.700.10-preview contains support for the following features: This is our first preview version of the Agility SDK, meaning that your machine must ...

We’re excited to unveil the DirectX 12 Agility SDK, an update that will allow devs to adopt the newest DirectX 12 graphics features faster than ever before.  With the Agility SDK, developers can now add the newest DirectX 12 features to their games, and gamers can play games with these features without having to upgrade their OS. Games can us...

This guide is intended for developers who want to get started developing games that use the Agility SDK. It covers: Be sure to also see our Announcement blog, Downloads Page, Game Stack Live talk and spec. Visit the DirectX Landing Page for more resources for DirectX developers. What is the Agility SDK and how does it w...

The team at The Coalition haven't stopped innovating since bringing Tier 1 VRS to Gears Tactics, and have brought Tier 2 VRS support to both Gears 5 and Gears Tactics.  The team saw similarly large perf gains from VRS Tier 2 - up to 14%! - this time with no noticeable visual impact. See for yourself if you can tell which side of the first image ...