DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
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DXC 1.8.2405 Available Now, Including HLSL 202x
The HLSL team is excited to announce DXC 1.8.2405 which is a packed release! In addition to a healthy assortment of bug fixes and quality of life improvements, this release features two things we’re really excited about. First this is the first DXC release to contain Windows binaries built with Clang alongside the binaries built with MSVC, and it includes the first feature planned for the next HLSL language version, which is ready for user testing. We will dig into a lot more details later in this post, but two quick TL;DRs are: As with all HLSL language versions, once our new language version is fea...
Agility SDK 1.614.0: R9B9G9E5 support for Render Targets and UAVs
Today the DirectX team is excited to announce the release of the Agility SDK 1.614.0 which includes full support for R9G9B9E5_SHAREDEXP (999E5) texture format for render targets and UAV read/writes! This new Agility SDK is also fully supported by PIX. To get the latest release head on over to our Agility SDK downloads page. Understanding the 999E5 Texture Format 999E5 was originally introduced in Direct3D 11 and Direct3D 12 in a limited capacity. Its Direct3D 12 support has now been extended to support render targets and UAVs. A key benefit of the 999E5 texture format is it enables efficient storage and ren...
D3D12 Work Graphs
This is the official release of D3D12 Work Graphs, enabling new types of GPU autonomy, originally available as a preview in 2023. To start, here's what Epic sees: With the proliferation of GPU-driven rendering techniques - such as Nanite in Unreal Engine 5 - the role of the CPU is trending towards primarily resource management and hazard tracking, with only a fraction of time spent generating GPU commands. Prior to D3D12 Work Graphs, it was difficult to perform fine-grained memory management on the GPU, which meant it was practically impossible to support algorithms with dynamic work expansion. Even si...
Agility SDK 1.613.3 Available Now, Including Support for GDC 2024 Showcase Features
We're pleased to announce the release of our latest Agility SDK, complete with features we'll be showcasing at GDC 2024. Get started today with the retail versions of Work Graphs, Shader Model 6.8, GPU Upload Heaps, and more! For previous versions, see our Agility SDK Downloads page. Work Graphs Work Graphs is a cutting-edge API that utilizes the full potential of your GPU. It’s not just an upgrade to the existing models, but a whole new paradigm that enables more efficient, flexible, and creative game development. With Work Graphs, you can generate and schedule GPU work on the fly, without relying...
DirectX Innovation on Display at GDC 2024
Update: Watch the full recording of our GDC 2024 DirectX State of the Union session Ft. Work Graphs and Introducing DirectSR on our Microsoft Game Dev channel. The excitement is building as we finish our preparations for this year's Game Developers Conference, set to kick off on March 18th. Industry leaders, developers, and enthusiasts will converge on San Francisco for a week of innovation, and the DirectX team here at Microsoft has a lot of exciting news to share. We've been gearing up to showcase new functionality in the Windows gaming ecosystem, including features that will define the future ...
Introducing Neural Processor Unit (NPU) support in DirectML (developer preview)
A developer preview of DirectML support for Intel® AI boost With the release of DirectML 1.13.1 and the ONNX Runtime 1.17, we are excited to announce developer preview support for NPU acceleration in DirectML, the machine learning platform API for Windows. This developer preview enables support for a subset of models on new Windows 11 devices with Intel® Core™ Ultra processors with Intel® AI boost. This initial release was developed using open source models and in close partnership with our launch partner, Samsung. "NPUs are emerging as a critical resource for broadly delivering efficient machine learning exp...
DirectML: Accelerating AI on Windows, now with NPUs
We are thrilled to announce our collaboration with Intel®, one of our key partners, to bring the first Neural Processing Unit (NPU) powered by DirectML on Windows. AI is transforming the world, driving innovation, and creating value across industries. NPUs are critical components in enabling amazing AI experiences for developers and consumers alike. An NPU is a processor built for enabling machine learning (ML) workloads that are computationally intensive, do not require graphics interactions, and provide efficient power consumption. These new devices will revolutionize how AI transforms our day-to-day experie...
Boost Your Gen AI Experience with our DirectML extension for Automatic1111’s WebUI
Olive is a powerful open-source Microsoft tool to optimize ONNX models for DirectML. You may remember from this year’s Build that we showcased Olive support for Stable Diffusion, a cutting-edge Generative AI model that creates images from text. We didn’t want to stop there, since many users access Stable Diffusion through Automatic1111's webUI, a popular and versatile interface for Stable Diffusion. Luckily this webUI supports extensions, and today we're thrilled to reveal our DirectML extension! Specifically, our extension offers DirectML support for the compute-heavy uNet models in Stable Diffusion. Th...
Announcing preview support for Llama 2 in DirectML
At Inspire this year we talked about how developers will be able to run Llama 2 on Windows with DirectML and the ONNX Runtime and we've been hard at work to make this a reality. We now have a sample showing our progress with Llama 2 7B! See https://github.com/microsoft/Olive/tree/main/examples/directml/llama_v2 This sample relies on first doing an optimization pass on the model with Olive, a powerful optimization tool for ONNX models. Olive utilizes powerful graph fusion optimizations from the ONNX Runtime and a model architecture optimized for DirectML to speed up inference times by up to 10X! After ...