DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
Gaming with Windows ML
Neural Networks Will Revolutionize Gaming Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the availability of Windows Machine Learning. We mentioned the wide-ranging applications of WinML on areas as diverse as security, productivity, and the internet of things. We even showed how WinML can be used to help cameras detect faulty chips during hardware production. But what does WinML mean for gamers? Gaming has always utilized and pushed adoption of bleeding edge technologies to create more beautiful and magical worlds. With innovations like WinML, which extensively use the GPU, it only makes sense to leverage that technol...
Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing!
If you just want to see what DirectX Raytracing can do for gaming, check out the videos from Epic, Futuremark and EA, SEED. To learn about the magic behind the curtain, keep reading. 3D Graphics is a Lie For the last thirty years, almost all games have used the same general technique—rasterization—to render images on screen. While the internal representation of the game world is maintained as three dimensions, rasterization ultimately operates in two dimensions (the plane of the screen), with 3D primitives mapped onto it through transformation matrices. Through approaches like z-buffering and occlusion culling...
Announcing new DirectX 12 features
Announcing new DirectX 12 features We’ve come a long way since we launched DirectX 12 with Windows 10 on July 29, 2015. Since then, we’ve heard every bit of feedback and improved the API to enhance stability and offer more versatility. Today, developers using DirectX 12 can build games that have better graphics, run faster and that are more stable than ever before. Many games now run on the latest version of our groundbreaking API and we’re confident that even more anticipated, high-end AAA titles will take advantage of DirectX 12. DirectX 12 is ideal for powering the games that run on PC and Xbox, which as of y...
GPUs in the task manager
The below posting is from Steve Pronovost, our lead engineer responsible for the GPU scheduler and memory manager. GPUs in the Task Manager We're excited to introduce support for GPU performance data in the Task Manager. This is one of the features you have often requested, and we listened. The GPU is finally making its debut in this venerable performance tool. To see this feature right away, you can join the Windows Insider Program. Or, you can wait for the Windows Fall Creator's Update. To understand all the GPU performance data, its helpful to know how Windows uses a GPUs. This blog dives into these details ...
GPU plugins, improved SDK layers, and hang debugging: Bringing DirectX 12 tools to the next level
If you are a Windows game developer using DirectX 12, you know that great tools are essential for getting the most out of the graphics hardware. In the past few months, we’ve been making rapid progress on delivering the tools you’ve requested. At the Game Developers Conference today, we demoed new features for both PIX, our premier tool for tuning and debugging, as well as the debug layers, a tool that ensures that your game is calling the DirectX 12 API correctly. Of course, no GDC talk would be complete without an announcement … Introducing hardware specific plugins for PIX PIX on Windows supports a plugin mo...
New DirectX Shader Compiler based on Clang/LLVM now available as Open Source
The DirectX HLSL (High Level Shading Language) compiler is now available as an open source project built on the Clang/LLVM framework. Microsoft drives the leading GPU shader language Since 2002, HLSL has been a key focus of industry collaboration on GPU programming. As the shader language for the popular DirectX12 API, HLSL is at the forefront of innovation in gaming on both Windows 10 and Xbox. Due to the clear importance of industry collaboration, we have made our latest technology available to a broader audience. This release brings industry collaboration on GPU programming and shader compiler development in...
DX12 performance tuning and debugging – PIX on Windows (beta) released!
Continued commitment to gaming on Windows 10 With Windows 10, we promised to build an OS designed for PC gaming, with DirectX 12 as one of the cornerstones of the Windows 10 gaming experience. In the 18 months since our release, DirectX 12 has seen very rapid adoption, with nearly 20 AAA games now available with DirectX 12 support. Much of this rapid adoption can be attributed to DirectX 12 offering game developers unprecedented control over GPUs, allowing game developers to build impressive games that take full advantage of the powerful hardware available to gamers today. The importance of great graphics tools ...
Explicit DirectX 12 MultiGPU, the Affinity Layer helper library, and your game
Rise of the Tomb Raider is the first DX12 explicit MultiGPU (mGPU) title for CrossFire/SLI machines and it shows some pretty nice gains over DX11 implicit mGPU giving you the best possible gaming experience. Read more about it on this blog post here. We've had several folks ask us how they can most easily implement the same thing in their apps and get that kind of performance. Well, we've just released a helper library called the Affinity Layer on our GitHub page to kick start your explicit DX12 mGPU implementation in your app! There's a sample that shows you how to integrate the library and if you want to ta...
Rise of the Tomb Raider, Explicit DirectX 12 MultiGPU, and a peek into the future
Rise of the Tomb Raider is the first title to implement explicit MultiGPU (mGPU) on CrossFire/SLI systems using the DX12 API. It works on both Win32 and UWP. Using the low level DX12 API, Rise of the Tomb Raider was able to achieve extremely good CPU efficiency and in doing so, extract more GPU power in a mGPU system than was possible before. This app, developed by Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes, even shows how explicit DX12 mGPU can win over DX11 implicit mGPU. In some configurations, you can even see up to 40% better mGPU scaling over DX11. Read below for details on what mGPU scaling is, where these gains are ...