DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
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DirectStorage 1.2 Available Now
Today we’re releasing the 1.2 version of the DirectStorage SDK, where we’ve added new features and made some fixes based on your feedback. The full list of changes can be found on the NuGet page and you can update to the latest version using NuGet update.   Visit the DirectStorage landing page for more information about how to get started. If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us on the #directstorage channel on the D3D12 Discord Server.  Force Buffered IO DirectStorage currently opens files in unbuffered mode. This allows us to avoid unnecessary copies, getting the data ont...
Agility SDK 1.610.3: Updated RenderPasses and minor Vulkan compatibility improvement
Contents: Updated RenderPasses Minor Vulkan compatibility improvements PIX support for these features Download here: Agility SDK Downloads Updated RenderPasses Background RenderPasses are an option for apps to organize rendering commands to be friendly to GPUs that need tile-based rendering to perform efficiently. Ideally, these GPUs can internally loop sequences of commands from the app in order to render surfaces a tile (sub-region) at a time. The tile size is a hidden implementation detail, and data for the current tile sits in small, fast memory close to the GPU's processors. The Rende...
Agility SDK 1.710.0-preview: GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized Sampling
We’re pleased to announce that we have a new preview Agility SDK out today, letting developers experiment with two new features: GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized Sampling! Head to Agility SDK Downloads to grab it. GPU Upload Heaps Introduction Historically a GPU’s VRAM was inaccessible to the CPU, forcing programs to have to copy large amounts of data to the GPU via the PCI bus. Most modern GPUs have introduced VRAM resizable base address register (BAR) enabling Windows to manage the GPU VRAM in WDDM 2.0 or later. With the VRAM being managed by Windows, D3D now exposes the heap memory access dir...
Video acceleration API (VA-API) now available on Windows!
Introduction What's VA-API? Originally developed by Intel, VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) is an open-source library and API specification, which provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing. It consists of a main library and driver-specific acceleration backends for each supported hardware vendor. Apps can use it to access video hardware acceleration capabilities via its interface specification for workloads such as decode, encode, processing, etc. The libva library -an Intel implementation for VA-API- is used along with a VA-API driver, to which the video operations are d...
Navigating the Redesigned Graphics Settings page
In the settings app, the graphics page lets you adjust settings related to ‘GPU Preference,’ ‘Auto HDR,’ ‘Optimizations for windowed games’, and more to get the most out of your graphics experience on your PC. Aligning with the new Windows 11 UI design, we’ve redesigned the graphics settings page to help you get to the settings you want faster. These UI changes are now available to Windows Insiders in Build 25281 or above. Click here to learn more about the Windows Insider Program. In this article, we will walk through the new design and explain what each setting can do to help you get the best experience f...
Updates in d3dx12.h: Nuget Packaging, Header Bloat Reduction, and D3DX12GetCopyableFootprints
Hey everyone, we recently updated our file! Previously, users were required to head to DirectX-Headers repo to grab the nice helper files. The recent Agility SDK 1.608.2 release bundles this repo with the Nuget packages! There are no differences between the two packages. Header Bloat Reduction Next, users of the DirectX-Headers repo may notice that no longer contains 5500 lines of code (hooray)! Previously, users would include all 5500 lines of code despite being only interested in one function provides. Today, developers can potentially reduce compile times by choosing to include from a...
DirectStorage GDeflate Reference Implementation Now Available
The GDeflate reference implementation is now available from the DirectStorage repo on GitHub. Developers can use this to easily integrate GDeflate into their asset compression tool chains and build compatible compressors. The compression and decompression algorithms are open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. How to Build: The GDeflate directory contains the codec source and sample code. The repo uses submodules, so be sure to pass to the git clone command. If you already cloned this repo, then you can run . Once cloned: Note: This code can be built using Linux as long as you have CM...
Agility SDK 1.608.0: Enhanced Barriers and more
We’ve published another Agility SDK, version 1.608.0. This Agility SDK has support for Enhanced Barriers, and a few minor DX12 features. That’s right: these features no longer require developer mode to run on your machine! Head to Agility SDK Downloads to grab it. Enhanced Barriers For an overview of Enhanced Barriers, please see here for our Enhanced Barriers preview announcement describing EBs in more detail. Minor Features This release contains support for Independent Front/Back Stencil Refs and Masks and Triangle fan primitives (see here for more) Dynamic Pipeline State: Depth Bias and the Index Bu...
DirectStorage 1.1 Now Available
The DirectStorage team is pleased to share that GPU decompression with DirectStorage 1.1 is available now. This new version of DirectStorage contains everything a developer needs to get started with GPU decompression. For more information on this feature and how it benefits gamers, check out our previous blog post: DirectStorage 1.1 Coming Soon. Getting Started with DirectStorage 1.1 For all the necessary resources to get started, please check out aka.ms/directstorage. This includes the NuGet repository with the redistributable package, the GitHub repo with samples and documentation, as well as links ...