DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
Celebrating 10 Years of DirectX 12
DirectX12 shipped in 2015 with a simple goal: give developers more control so games run faster, look better, and scale across Windows PC and console. Over the last decade, DirectX 12 delivered on that promise. We added features and made it easier for developers to focus on gameplay & graphics by providing more flexibility and achievable performance wins. We built technologies that dramatically reduce load times and deliver consistently high frames for a polished gaming experience in the most demanding of titles. Our platform’s continuous evolution brought advanced visuals previously unimaginable into the main...
DirectX Graphics Samples Updated to Agility SDK + Enhanced Barriers examples
We’re excited to share all DirectX Graphics Samples have been updated to use the latest DirectX 12 Agility SDK. What’s New: Why Enhanced Barriers Matter: Enhanced Barriers introduce a more expressive and predictable barrier model, reducing synchronization overhead and simplifying resource layout management and aliasing. Get Started: Visit https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples to explore the updated samples.
Agility SDK 1.618: Advanced Shader Delivery and 1.716 out of preview
We are pleased to announce the retail release of AgilitySDK 1.618, available on Agility SDK Downloads today! This release promotes our 1.716 features out of preview and also introduces support for the recently announced advanced shader delivery feature. Advanced Shader Delivery Advanced shader delivery is a new feature that distributes precompiled shaders when downloading a game, eliminating in-game shader compilation stutter and long load times. This solves one of the biggest pain points in PC gaming today, making it easier than ever to deliver a console-quality experience on Windows. Advanced shader delive...
The Silicon, Graphics, Media and AI (SiGMA) team is hiring!
Do you want to be a part of the Silicon, Graphics, Media and AI (SiGMA) platform team? We are hiring for multiple positions – if you’re interested in knowing more about opportunities in SiGMA, please see the below for more details!
Shader Model 6.9 and The Future of Cooperative Vector
Direct3D Cooperative Vector is Evolving DirectX continues to evolve to support the growing demands of AI and machine learning workloads. As part of this effort, we plan to introduce an expanded suite of linear algebra capabilities in a future Shader Model release, unlocking even more robust GPU acceleration for bedrock AI/ML computations within the graphics pipeline. This work extends our experimental Cooperative Vector implementation by introducing accelerated matrix-matrix operations, crucial for scaling AI/ML workloads beyond what lightweight vector-matrix alone can handle. This will unlock new performanc...
Introducing Advanced Shader Delivery
This year at gamescom, Microsoft is highlighting new gaming features coming for Windows, particularly for handheld devices. We want to highlight one of the DirectX team’s most exciting new contributions to the PC gaming ecosystem, which will make its debut on the new ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. Advanced shader delivery addresses one of the most frustrating challenges for PC gamers today – long load times and disruptive stuttering during a game’s first launch. These delays are caused by the need to compile graphics shaders and cache them for future use. For a deep-dive on this topic, we recommend reading...
DirectStorage 1.3 is now available
Today we’re releasing DirectStorage 1.3, this update includes a new API and several refinements based on developer feedback. The package is now available for download via NuGet. Read on to learn about what’s new with DirectStorage 1.3. EnqueueRequests – Enhanced I/O Scheduling DirectStorage 1.3 adds a new API called EnqueueRequests. This API gives developers more flexibility and control over how data requests are issued and synchronized with graphics work. EnqueueRequests allows developers to batch multiple requests in a single call and synchronize them using a D3D12 fence to better coordinate DirectStorage wit...
D3D12 Cooperative Vector
Welcome to the preview release for Cooperative Vector support in D3D12. This exposes powerful new hardware acceleration for vector and matrix operations, enabling developers to efficiently drive neural rendering techniques directly from individual shader threads in real-time graphics pipelines. In research and in industry, machine learning based approaches have made their way to mainstream, replacing/augmenting traditional techniques. In graphics, neural network based rendering methods are gaining popularity over traditional methods of image reconstruction, texture compression, material shading etc. Simul...
D3D12 Opacity Micromaps
DirectX Raytracing (DXR) now supports Opacity Micromaps (OMMs), enabling hardware to handle alpha tested geometry more efficiently than relying only on costly AnyHit shader invocations. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including OMMs, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Recording. In the video, Remedy showed the performance wins they achieve using a synergistic combination of OMMs and Shader Execution Reordering in Alan Wake 2. Out of the gate all NVIDIA raytracing capable hardware supports OMMs (currently developer preview drivers). Over time additional hardwa...
D3D12 Shader Execution Reordering
Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is an addition to DirectX Raytracing that enables application shader code inform hardware how to find coherency across rays so they can be sorted to execute better in parallel. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including SER, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Recording. In the video, Remedy showed the performance wins they achieve using a synergistic combination of Opacity Micromaps (OMMs) and Shader Execution Reordering in Alan Wake 2. SER is designed such that when applications use it to give sorting hints to drivers, it is u...
Agility SDK 1.717-preview and 1.616-retail
We are pleased to announce both a retail and preview Agility SDK release with several new features, available on Agility SDK Downloads today! As usual, the features in this release come with Day One PIX support. Please read the PIX blog post for more information. Agility SDK 1.717-preview features Check out the full spec at D3D12 Video Encoding | DirectX-Specs. Agility SDK 1.616-retail features
HLSL Native and Long Vectors
Vectors have been supported as native primitive types in HLSL from the beginning. However, they have been limited to a maximum of 4 elements. This was reasonable for the use cases for which HLSL was designed as 3D vertices, 3D vectors, and RGBA colors can be fully represented using 4 scalar values or fewer. There are other applications in the machine learning (ML) space and for uses of vectors that don't directly map to these concepts that benefit from longer vectors. Sometimes they benefit from much longer vectors! These uses are principally, though not exclusively, through Cooperative Vectors. To meet the...
Announcing DirectX Raytracing 1.2, PIX, Neural Rendering and more at GDC 2025!
Today in the DirectX State of the Union at GDC 2025, we proudly showcased the next evolution in graphics with the announcement of DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2. This update promises groundbreaking performance improvements and breathtaking visual fidelity, marking another milestone in our mission to deliver immersive, realistic experiences to gamers everywhere. We also brought developers the latest and greatest in our DirectX tooling with updates to PIX. In partnership with industry leaders—including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, and game studios like Remedy—we demonstrated how these advancements are set to...
DirectX at GDC 2025
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 essent...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: New D3D12 Video Encode Features
UPDATE 9/25/25: This feature is now supported in retail as of the 1.618 Agility SDK. Today DirectX 12 provides APIs to support GPU video encode acceleration for several applications, as detailed in D3D12 Video Encoding - Windows drivers | Microsoft Learn previous blog posts such as Announcing new DirectX 12 feature - Video Encoding! - DirectX Developer Blog. In this blog post we’re happy to announce a series of new features included in the Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview that provide more control to apps using the D3D12 Video Encode API. These new features help reduce latency and improve quality in several scen...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview & 1.615-retail: Shader hash bypass
The D3D runtime as of 1.615 officially supports applications opting to bypass shader hash validation. The historical purpose of the hash that the DX shader compiler embeds in every shader binary was to give the D3D runtime to confidence that shaders being given to it are well formed. The assumption was that a hashed shader likely came from an official compiler that ran its validator run on the code, and also that there was no memory corruption after that. These assumptions still apply by default. Meaning most developers that just want to use DXC to compile shaders and pass them to D3D can continue to do so,...
AgilitySDK 1.716.0-preview and 1.615-retail
We are pleased to announce both a retail release of Shader hash bypass and a preview AgilitySDK release with several new features, available on Agility SDK Downloads today! You can find detailed information about all the features on the individual blog pages:
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: Application Specific Driver State
UPDATE 9/25/25: This feature is now supported in retail as of the 1.618 Agility SDK. Today we’re excited to announce the release of a new D3D12 feature: Application Specific Driver State. This feature is intended to be used by capture/replay tools, such as PIX on Windows, to help with issues caused by “app detect” behavior. Background D3D12 drivers occasionally have to perform workarounds for bugs in specific applications. For example, this may occur if an older game shipped with a bug that only affects a new generation of GPUs. The driver may be forced to detect when the application is running and then perf...