Jacques van Rhyn, Author at DirectX Developer Blog

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Agility SDK 1.608.0: Enhanced Barriers and more

November 18th, 2022

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 ...

Announcing our summer Agility SDKs

July 14th, 2022

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 ...

Agility SDK 1.700.10 – our first Agility SDK preview!

December 8th, 2021

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 ...

Announcing the DirectX 12 Agility SDK!

April 20th, 2021

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...

Getting Started with the Agility SDK

April 20th, 2021

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 ...

Moving Gears to Tier 2 Variable Rate Shading

January 12th, 2021

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 ...

Iterating on Variable Rate Shading in Gears Tactics

May 26th, 2020

Gears Tactics is the very first game to ship with support for DirectX 12 Variable Rate Shading (VRS), one of the major features in DirectX 12 Ultimate. VRS let Gears Tactics achieve large performance gains – up to 18.9% (!) – on a wide range of hardware with a minimal impact on visual quality. Check out this guest post where Jacob ...

DirectX 12 Ultimate Getting Started Guide

March 19th, 2020

So, you’re a developer sold on the next-gen features in DirectX 12 Ultimate? Look no further than this little guide! 1) OS The complete set of DirectX 12 Ultimate features is be available in the next retail version of Windows 10, version 2004 (also called the Windows 10 May 2020 Update). As of 5/27, you can get this version of ...

DirectX 12 and Fortnite

November 20th, 2019

On Monday, Epic Games announced that DirectX 12 support is coming to Fortnite. And today, the wait is over: anyone updating to the v11.20 patch has the option to try out Fortnite’s beta DX12 path! What does this all mean? Let's see if we can help! What’s wrong with DX11? Nothing! We at the DirectX team designed ...

CPU- and GPU-boundedness

November 20th, 2019

We wrote this article to explain two key terms: CPU-bound and GPU-bound. There's some misinformation about this terms, and we're hoping this article can help fix this problem. Even though applications run on the CPU, many modern-day applications require a lot of GPU support. These apps generate a list of rendering instructions (i.e. the ...

Jacques van Rhyn

Program Manager, Graphics

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