DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
In the works: HLSL Shader Model 6.7
It's that time again! Microsoft and its partners are excited to announce the ongoing development of the latest HLSL Shader Model, 6.7! Shader Model 6.7 expands texture, quad, and wave shader capabilities in response to requests from HLSL users. It is still a work in progress and not yet available in any release, but implementation and updates will be showing up in the DXC Github Repository. Feature Details Advanced Texture Operations SM 6.7 adds a collection of useful texture capabilities that fill in gaps the capabilities of certain texture operations as well as adding versatile new ones collectively...
Windows Graphics News – 2021 Q4
2021 has come to an end and it’s time to reflect on what the Graphics team has been busy with in the last quarter of the year - we’ll brief you on hiring, DirectX in Gaming, new graphics features, as well as graphics industry news.
Agility SDK 1.600.10 – minor bugfix release
This minor release contains a fix for a raytracing related threading bug in previous Agility SDK releases. There were intermittent crashes in the runtime for apps doing multithreaded creation of raytracing state objects.
Announcing HLSL 2021
Today we are excited to announce the release of HLSL 2021! HLSL 2021 brings an assortment of new language features that we think will make shader authoring in HLSL more familiar and productive. Enabling HLSL 2021 is as easy as passing the `-HV 2021`, and you can immediately start enjoying all the new language features like: We intend to make HLSL 2021 the default language version in a future release after giving time for developers to test adopt and migrate code, and for us to perform more testing and integration. Once it is made the default you can use the `-HV` flag to specify an older l...
Agility SDK 1.700.10 – our first Agility SDK preview!
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 be in developer mode to access these features. Roadmap and release availability The Agility SDK allows the DirectX team to make features available on every OS Windows 10 version 1909 (Windows 10 November 2019 Update) and up. For more on the OS versions that support...
Announcing new DirectX 12 feature – Video Encoding!
Introduction Today DirectX 12 provides APIs to support GPU acceleration for several video applications such as Video Decoding, Video Processing and Motion estimation as detailed in Direct3D 12 Video Overview. We are happy to announce that D3D12 has added a new Video Encode feature to the existing video API families, with a new set of interfaces that allow developers to perform video encoding using GPU accelerated video engines. This feature provides a new way for apps to implement video encoding consistently with the DirectX 12 principles and style. Video Encode API Remarks In terms of data flow, the...
D3D12 Enhanced Barriers Preview
Good news for developers frustrated by confusing and inefficient D3D12 resource barriers, Enhanced Barriers are coming soon to D3D12, and are available now for experimental preview. Enhanced Barriers are a new set of D3D12 API’s that give developers independent control over GPU work synchronization, texture layout transitions, and cache flushing (“resource memory access”). Enhanced barriers replace resource state barriers with more expressive barrier types. Enhanced barriers offer less latency, support for concurrent read and write (including same-resource copy), diverse aliasing topologies, and better concurrenc...
Windows Graphics News – 2021 Q3
The third quarter of 2021 has passed, which means it’s time for another Windows Graphics News update where we show you what we have been up to! On this blog we will talk about opportunities to join the team, new graphics features, updates on existing features and graphics industry news.
Introducing a New API for Checking Feature Support in Direct3D 12
Background Direct3D can perform a lot of different operations. We use “capability” or “cap” to describe what the library can do. Direct3D 12 has a single API, ID3D12Device::CheckFeatureSupport, which tells us whether a cap is supported and its level of support in the runtime environment. Here's the function signature: To make use of this API, you must provide a D3D12_FEATURE enum to identify the feature group you're querying. You must also provide a pointer to one of the D3D12_FEATURE_DATA_* data structures specific to that feature and its size. You may find this API hard to use for the following reasons: ...