Shawn Hargreaves

Announcing DirectX 12 Ultimate

March 19th, 2020

  It is time for DirectX to evolve once again.   From the team that has brought PC and Console gamers the latest in graphics innovation for nearly 25 years, we are beyond pleased to bring gamers DirectX 12 Ultimate, the culmination of the best graphics technology we’ve ever introduced in an unprecedented alignment between ...

DirectX Developer Day Schedule

March 18th, 2020

Tomorrow (3/19) is DirectX Developer Day! Join the Microsoft DirectX team, along with partners AMD and NVIDIA, for a series of talks and demos covering the future of gaming graphics: Streaming will start at 10:00 AM PDT. Whether you’re a game developer, graphics enthusiast or just curious about ...

New in D3D12 – background shader optimizations

April 16th, 2019

tl;dr; In the next update to Windows, codenamed 19H1, D3D12 will allow drivers to use idle priority background CPU threads to dynamically recompile shader programs. This can improve GPU performance by specializing shader code to better match details of the hardware it is running on and/or the context in which it is being used. Developers don...

DirectX engineering specs published

April 9th, 2019

Engineering specs for a number of DirectX features, including DirectX Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading, and all of D3D11, are now available at https://microsoft.github.io/DirectX-Specs. This supplements the official API documentation with an extra level of detail that can be useful to expert developers. The specs are licensed under ...

Direct3D team office has a Wall of GPU History

January 7th, 2019

When you are the team behind something like Direct3D, you need many different graphics cards to test on.  And when you’ve been doing this for as long as we have, you’ll inevitably accumulate a LOT of cards left over from years gone by.  What to do with them all?  One option would be to store boxes in someone’s office: But...

For best performance, use DXGI flip model

April 9th, 2018

This document picks up where the MSDN “DXGI flip model” article and YouTube DirectX 12: Presentation Modes In Windows 10 and Presentation Enhancements in Windows 10: An Early Look videos left off.  It provides developer guidance on how to maximize performance and efficiency in the presentation stack on modern versions of Windows.   ...