DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
Evolving DirectX for the ML Era on Windows
At GDC this year, we shared how machine learning is becoming foundational to real time graphics, and how DirectX is evolving to meet that shift across shader level and model level ML. ML is no longer a niche optimization or a postprocess trick. It’s increasingly embedded throughout the graphics pipeline, influencing how frames are generated, how content is authored, and how game developers realize their artistic vision. DirectX is evolving to support this future— one where ML is a first-class citizen alongside traditional rendering workloads. Introducing DX Linear Algebra Last year, DirectX took a major step in...
DirectX: Bringing Console-Level Developer Tools to Windows
On March 12th, 2026, the DirectX team and our hardware partners hosted DirectX: Bringing Console-Level GPU Developer Tools to Windows at GDC. We shared our dream of bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows, and today we are announcing a major step toward that goal with the biggest wave of new tooling features in DirectX's history. For the first time, all four Windows GPU hardware partners joined us on stage to demonstrate these features running on their hardware. AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm have worked closely with us throughout feature development, each making significant contributions to ...
Advanced Shader Delivery: What’s New at GDC 2026
Today we announced the innovation we’re bringing in solving shader compilation for the ecosystem at our GDC Talk: Advanced Shader Delivery for Windows. Want to find out what this means for solving shader compilation for your title and customers? Read on! State of the Industry Long shader compilation times and in-game shader stutter for D3D12 apps are two of the biggest problems in PC gaming. These problems are caused by compiling shaders at runtime. Unlike console, PC games do not have a fixed driver and GPU environment, and precompiled shaders need a way to be delivered to a large matrix of drivers and GPUs in...
DirectStorage 1.4 release adds support for Zstandard
Today we’re releasing the public preview of DirectStorage 1.4 and the initial public preview of the Game Asset Conditioning Library. Together, they introduce Zstandard (Zstd) compression as an option for game assets on Windows. This new support meets the needs of the gaming ecosystem, bringing an open standard that improves compression ratios, enables faster load times, and provides smoother asset streaming for content-rich games. We shared this availability at GDC in DirectX State of the Union: DirectStorage and Beyond, along with how our GPU hardware and software vendor partnerships will help this work reach...
DirectX Innovation at GDC 2026
The excitement is building as we head into the 2026 Game Developer Conference and the DirectX team has a lot to share. We will be showcasing major updates in asset streaming, GPU tooling, ML-powered real-time graphics on Windows, and shader compilation at GDC. If you’re attending GDC, we’d love to see you in person. Below is a quick preview of what we’ll be covering so that you can mark your calendars! DirectX State of the Union 2026: DirectStorage and Beyond Wednesday, March 11, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM (Room 3001, West Hall) Over the past year, we've tackled some of the toughest challenges facing develop...
Announcing Shader Model 6.9 Retail and New D3D12 Improvements
Today, we are pleased to announce that Shader Model 6.9 and other features have been officially released with Agility SDK 1.619 and complementary DXC 1.9.2602.16. Many of these features have been in preview status since 2025. Simultaneously, we are releasing a handful of new preview features in a separate preview runtime: Agility SDK 1.719-preview. Overview AgilitySDK 1.619 exposes the following features. There's more detail further below, including download and driver links. AgilitySDK 1.719-preview exposes the features in 1.619 in addition to th...
Fence Barriers: Fine-Grained GPU Synchronization in Direct3D 12
Introducing Fence Barriers We are excited to share the preview release of Fence Barriers (Tier-1), a new capability now available in AgilitySDK 1.719-preview (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx12agility/). Fence Barriers expand on Enhanced Barriers to provide support for signaling and waiting on fences during command buffer execution. This provides more flexibility to synchronize between more distant dependencies in the command stream and allows for real-time dependencies between the GPU timeline and CPU timeline. This preview exposes Tier-1 Fence Barriers, which supports: Loo...
D3D12 Shader Execution Reordering
Now officially released, 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. SER support is a required feature in Shader Model 6.9, meaning all drivers must accept shader code using SER. It's up to individual devices to take advantage if possible. 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 raytracing cost reduced by 1/3 using a ...
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 raytracing cost reduced by 1/3 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. Over time additional hardware vendor support for OMMs will appear. ...
Standardizing HLSL
The HLSL team is excited to announce the formation of Ecma Technical Committee 57; a committee to standardize the High Level Shading Language. The formation of this committee marks an important milestone in HLSL's development and strengthens Microsoft's commitment to HLSL as a cross-platform language, built in collaboration with equal partners across the industry. All of the work of the committee will be public on GitHub, and the final standard will be available royalty-free for implementers. I will be talking about all of this and more on February 12, 2026 at the Khronos Shading Languages Symposium (watch on ...
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...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: Recreate At GPUVA
UPDATE 9/25/25: This feature is now supported in retail as of the 1.618 Agility SDK. New Recreate At GPUVA Feature After months of effort from both our hardware partners and us, the D3D12 team is happy to announce the preview of the Recreate At GPUVA feature as part of its Agility SDK Downloads 1.716 release. This feature is mostly intended to be used by tooling developers, such as PIX, to simplify capturing and replaying of GPU workloads. The Problem: Resource allocation behaves much like malloc in C, there are no guarantees about what memory address is given to the caller. Within a single process this is us...
Enabling Neural Rendering in DirectX: Cooperative Vector Support Coming Soon
Neural Rendering: A New Paradigm in 3D Graphics Programming In the constantly advancing landscape of 3D graphics, neural rendering technology represents a significant evolution. Neural rendering broadly defines the suite of techniques that leverage AI/ML to dramatically transform traditional graphics pipelines. These new methods promise to push the boundaries of what’s possible in real-time graphics. DirectX is committed to cross-platform enablement of neural rendering techniques, and cooperative vectors are at the core of this initiative. We are excited to share our plans to add cooperative vector support to...
Agility SDK 1.716.0-preview: Tight Alignment of Resources
UPDATE 9/25/25: This feature is now supported in retail as of the 1.618 Agility SDK. We’re pleased to announce that we have a new preview Agility SDK out today, letting developers try out the new Tight Alignment feature! You can find the NuGet package here. Background When placed resources were introduced in D3D12, there was an intentional decision to simplify alignment restrictions and take the greatest common denominator across the hardware ecosystem. There was a desire to migrate to tighter alignment across the ecosystem over time, but this hadn't happened yet. Since D3D12's launch, developers have ...
DirectSR Preview: Now Supporting AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution (FSR) 3.1 Upscaler
Following our initial announcement of the DirectSR preview, we are pleased to share an update. DirectSR, our standardized super resolution (SR) API for D3D12 titles, now supports FSR 3.1 (upscaler-only), bringing enhanced upscaling capabilities to further improve your gaming experience. Learn more about FSR 3.1 here. What’s New with FSR 3.1? With this update, developers can leverage FSR 3.1 upscaler alongside other leading SR technologies like Intel XeSS and NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution through DirectSR’s common interface. This ensures a consistent and high-quality gaming experience across various hardware conf...
DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future
Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released, DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V™. The HLSL team is committed to open development processes and collaborating with The Khronos® Group and LLVM Project. We’re sharing this information at the beginning of our multi-year development process so that we can be transparent about this transition from the start. We are working with the Khronos SPIR™ and Vulkan® working groups to ensure that this transition benefits the whole development ecosystem. Embracing...
The Silicon Graphics Media and Artificial Intelligence (SiGMA) team is hiring!
Do you want to be a part of the Silicon Graphics Media and Artificial Intelligence (SiGMA) platform team? We are hiring for multiple positions in multiple locations - if you're interested in knowing more about opportunities in SiGMA, please see the below for more details! Note: We have several upcoming positions – stay tuned as we’ll continuously update this blog post as more job opportunities become live!
D3D12 Preview: Mesh Nodes in Work Graphs
Hi everyone, Today we’re excited to announce the newest Preview Agility SDK v1.715.0, download here. Since this is a preview SDK, the new features are not in final state and thus only available via Developer Mode within Windows (see the prerequisites section for more). This preview serves as a first look to explore what might be possible to ship in a future retail Agility SDK. We encourage developers to try out the feature and provide feedback to askd3dteam@microsoft.com which may influence the final design. - DirectX team Contents Overview Work graphs was...
Open Sourcing DXIL Validator Hash
Today the HLSL team is announcing plans to open source the DXIL validator hashing algorithm and include it in the DirectXShaderCompiler sources on GitHub. If you’re wondering what any of that means, strap in! DXIL Validator To understand the DXIL Validator you first need to understand a few basics of what DXIL is. DXIL, the DirectX Intermediate Language, is the format used to provide shader binaries to DirectX drivers. DXIL is based on the LLVM-3.7 IR module format, but is constrained to not support all valid features of LLVM’s IR. The constraints placed on a DXIL module are enforced by the DXIL Validato...