DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
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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...
A Step Forward for Gaming on Arm Devices
This year at Microsoft Build 2024 we announced a new set of Windows devices, Copilot+ PCs. Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 PCs, including Arm-powered devices that are powered by the Snapdragon® X Series. These new Arm devices have cutting-edge new processing power coming from the CPU, GPU, and NPU (neural processing unit). This new hardware, in combination with innovations in Windows 11, is a step forward for Arm gaming. A few weeks ago, we showed several initiatives that improve the gaming experience on Arm-based Copilot+ PCs: advancements such as Prism emulation, automatic super resolution (Auto SR)...
Automatic Super Resolution: The First OS-Integrated AI-Based Super Resolution for Gaming
Welcome to the latest innovation in gaming graphics with Automatic super resolution (Auto SR)—the first OS-integrated AI super resolution (SR) technique where your games not only play smoother, but look stunning too! Ready for a quick visual challenge? Take a glance at these side-by-side images of Borderlands 3 played natively at 1440p versus one rendered at 720p but enhanced by AI-based Auto SR. Can you spot which one uses AI to boost visual quality? Me neither. And here’s a twist: while one runs at 24 frames per second, the other zips along at 40. Which do you think is which? As you ponder, let me int...
DirectSR Preview Available Now
In the evolving landscape of Super Resolution (SR), GPU hardware vendors have set the stage with their respective technologies – AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution, Intel XeSS, and NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution. These cutting-edge solutions elevate the gaming experience by boosting frame rates while maintaining exceptional visual quality. Yet as the number of SR variants continues to grow, developers are in search of a common SR API that will seamlessly scale across the hardware ecosystem. Today, we are thrilled to announce the preview release of DirectSR, a new API designed to standardize SR support in D3D12 titles...
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...