DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
Announcing WARP preview with Shader Model 6.7 support
The D3D team is pleased to announce the availability of a downloadable preview version of WARP, also known as Microsoft Basic Render Adapter. What is WARP? This software rasterizer is a key component of Windows and is leveraged for rendering 2D and 3D graphics on Windows PCs that don’t have any GPU available or don’t have a suitable GPU driver, as well as for offloading rendering work to the CPU to free up GPU resources. You can read more about WARP and how to use it in your application here: Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) Guide - Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn. But WARP is more than just a fal...
Celebrating 20 Years of DirectX 9
The last 20 years have brought countless hours of play to millions of gamers via the DirectX 9 graphics API, with 2,500+ games still being enjoyed today. For the first time, developers experienced the power of high-level shader language (HLSL) combined with pixel and vertex shaders, paving the way for the future of DirectX Raytracing and high-precision floating point color, which would bring new levels of quality and depth to every pixel.  Microsoft is committed to bringing you a great gaming experience and in honor of the 20th anniversary of DirectX 9, we’re happy continue our dedication to the API through D...
The Windows HDR Calibration app is here
The wait for the Windows HDR Calibration app is over! If you're on Windows 11 and want to calibrate your HDR-capable device, you can now go to the Microsoft Store and download the app. 😊 As we shared in our announcement blog post, the Windows HDR Calibration app will feature three test patterns which will help you calibrate your display by improving the color accuracy and consistency of your HDR panel. Besides that, we also added additional functionality - the app will allow you to customize the color saturation of all content when HDR is turned on! Benefits of calibrating your HDR device In some c...
Announcing our summer Agility SDKs
We’re pleased to announce that we have two new Agility SDKs available today! Agility SDK 1.606.3 contains support for Shader Model 6.7, which we announced was in the works earlier this year. Today, Shader Model 6.7 is ready for you to try! We also have another preview Agility SDK out today: 1.706.3-preview, see here for our blog. In addition to SM 6.7 support, this SDK contains a new and improved preview for Enhanced Barriers, plus a few smaller features. The addition of Enhanced Barriers support in this preview also makes Shader Model 6.7 is even more useful by letting developers access the full capabiliti...
Agility SDK 1.606.3: Shader Model 6.7 is now publicly available!
The DirectX Compiler Team and our partners are pleased to announce the release of Shader Model 6.7! Shader Model 6.7 expands texture fetching, quad querying, and wave capabilities to enable ever more complex (and compatible) new shader-driven features! Advanced Texture Operations SM 6.7 adds a collection of useful texture capabilities that fill in gaps the capabilities of existing texture operations as well as adding versatile new ones collectively referred to as Advanced Texture Operations. This will be an optional feature. Integer Sampling Textures with integer components can now be sampled. To enable ...
Preview Agility SDK 1.706.3-preview: SM 6.7, Enhanced Barriers and more
In addition to support for Shader Model 6.7, this preview Agility SDK contains improved support for Enhanced Barriers and some smaller features For more on the public release of Shader Model 6.7, please see our 1.606.3 announcement. With the addition of preview Enhanced Barriers and Relaxed Format Casting support, raw gathers will achieve their full utility by allowing casting of a wide range of formats to unsigned integer views to grant direct access to the elements using raw gathers. For more details please see here. When using this developer preview agility SDK, set D3D12SDKVersion to D3D12_PREVIEW_SDK_...
Agility SDK 1.602.4
This is a bug-fix-only update to 1.602.0. No new features. NuGet Gallery | Microsoft.Direct3D.D3D12 1.602.4 Bug Fixes
DirectStorage SDK 1.0.2
Thank you to everyone who tried out the DirectStorage SDK - we've really enjoyed interacting with you on the #directstorage channel on the D3D12 Discord Server, and on github. Today we're releasing an update to the SDK where we've addressed some of the feedback you've sent us! You can update to the latest using NuGet update. Visit https://aka.ms/directstorage for more information about how to get started. Changelog
Windows Graphics News – 2022 Q1
The first quarter of 2022 has gone by, so let’s talk about what the Graphics team has been up to! On this blog post we talk about: We’re hiring! We still have a lot of PM and SWE roles open for several teams in Graphics! Check out aka.ms/graphicsjobs for a full list of our open jobs - we look at every application that we get. We also have several new roles since our previous blog update! Have any questions about any of the roles? Please get hold of us at discord.gg/DirectX New features Optimizations for windowed games Optimizations for windowed games (OWG) was released t...