We’re counting down the days until the Microsoft DirectX team will be at the Game Developers Conference 2025 with a lineup of exciting sessions and announcements to push the boundaries of game development. Whether you’re a seasoned graphics developer or just diving into the world of DirectX, our sessions will offer valuable insights into the latest advancements in raytracing, PIX, neural rendering, and more. Mark your calendars and get ready for an inside look at the future of graphics with DirectX!

DirectX State of the Union: Raytracing and PIX Workflows

When: Thursday, March 20th 9:30am-10:30am

Gain essential insights into the latest DirectX features to accelerate your projects and optimize your development process. This session will spotlight enhanced raytracing capabilities that boost both performance and visual fidelity, including an exclusive look at an impressive demo from Remedy Entertainment that showcases these advancements in action. The DirectX team will also introduce updates to PIX, featuring improved data visualization tools, a refined API, and an upgraded user interface to streamline development workflows. Additionally, we’ll showcase the latest advancements in work graphs and mesh nodes with a new demo highlighting progress made in the last year.

Advanced Graphics Summit: Cooperative Vectors and Neural Rendering

When: Monday, March 17th, 9:30–10:30 AM

Cooperative vectors, an exciting new feature coming to Direct3D and High-level Shader Language (HLSL), will revolutionize real-time graphics by enabling seamless integration of ML inferences directly into the graphics pipeline. Join this session to discover how DirectX is going to help us all build the future of neural rendering and stay tuned for the cooperative vectors preview release in April!

Advanced Graphics Summit: GPU Work Graphs: Towards GPU-Driven Games (Presented by AMD)

When: Monday, March 17th 2:40pm-3:40pm

Last year, the DirectX team introduced work graphs support, and this year AMD is taking it to the next level with an in-depth look at how GPU work graphs are redefining GPU programmability. Join this session to explore the latest AMD research and see practical examples of how you can integrate work graphs into your own projects today!

Advances in RTX (Presented by NVIDIA)

When: Wednesday, March 19th 9:00am-10:00am

The DirectX team will join NVIDIA to talk about DirectX’s role in enabling the new paradigm of neural rendering across the industry via cooperative vectors, including an exclusive look at our roadmap for the release of cooperative vectors.

RTX Neural Shading: Practical Techniques and Applications (Presented by NVIDIA)

When: Wednesday March 19th 12:30pm-1:30pm

The DirectX team will join NVIDIA to explore practical techniques for leveraging Direct3D’s Cooperative Vectors for Neural Shading: a set of cutting-edge techniques that incorporate small neural networks into the traditional rendering tasks, such as replacing complex shading calculations with a neural approximation or using neural networks to compress textures.

Join Us at GDC 2025

We’re excited to connect with the game development community and share what’s next for DirectX. Be sure to add these sessions to your GDC schedule, follow the DirectX blog, and join our Discord server for more updates. See you at GDC!