DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
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 ...
Enhanced Color Filter Controls for Windows 11
A new feature to help color blind users customize their display settings (top) The Color filter preview without any color filter applied, (bottom) Color filter preview with red-green (protanopia, red-weak) filter applied Introduction At Microsoft, we are committed to making our products and services accessible to everyone. We believe that technology can empower people of all abilities and backgrounds to achieve more. Today, we are proud to announce improvements to the Color Filters on Windows 11: we have added sliders to control intensity and color boost and optimized Color Filters to redu...
Optimizing hybrid laptop performance with Cross Adapter Scan-Out (CASO)
Introduction For an avid gamer, having a robust Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is non-negotiable for an optimal gaming experience. Hybrid laptops, equipped with both an integrated GPU (iGPU) and a discrete GPU (dGPU), have become a popular choice for many. If you've delved into maximizing your laptop gaming performance, you've undoubtedly heard of specialized hardware solutions like NVIDIA’s Advanced Optimus or AMDs Smart Access Graphics. But what if your laptop lacks these dedicated features? That's where DirectX's Cross Adapter Scan-Out (CASO) comes into play. Without the need for specialized hardware solutio...
HLSL 2021 Migration Guide
The DirectX Shader Compiler Summer 2023 release is live! The most significant change in this release is the enabling of the HLSL 2021 language version by default. HLSL 2021 includes templates, operator overloads, bitfields, short-circuiting, and modernizations to loop variable scope and implicit struct casting. You can read about the details of these features in Chris Bieneman's dog-themed blog post. This post documents the gotchas that you might encounter when compiling your existing shaders with HLSL 2021 to benefit from all this goodness. Specifically, it will focus on: To explain these cha...
D3D12 Work Graphs Preview
Work Graphs is now out of preview. See the launch blog here Contents Introduction to work graphs Work graphs are a system for GPU autonomy in D3D12. Given the increasing prevalence of general compute workloads on GPUs, the motivation is to address some limitations in their programming model, unlock latent GPU capabilities, and enable future evolution. To start, here are some words on the potential: Epic Games has been searching and advocating for a better solution to the GPU generated work problem for a while now. ...
Agility SDK 1.711.3-preview: Work Graphs, Wave Matrix, AV1 Encoding
Hi everyone, Today we’re excited to announce the newest Preview Agility SDK v1.711.3 download; This SDK previews three new features for developers to discover. First is Work Graphs, a new way for the GPU to create work for itself. Second is Wave Matrix support, which allows developers to take advantage of dedicated silicon to speed matrix multiplications commonly used in Machine Learning (ML) and Imaging applications. Finally, we have support for encoding AV1 video on GPUs drastically reducing encoding time. Note that this is a preview SDK, which means not all features are representative of their fina...