Groundbreaking performance improvements

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A multitude of updates about GPUs and their technology have emerged from GDC 2025, and during its DirectX State of the Union event, Microsoft revealed an upgrade to DirectX Raytracing (DXR).

In a recent post on Microsoft’s Development Blogs, Microsoft’s Lead Program Manager, Cassie Hoef, shared additional details regarding the DirectX Raytracing 1.2 update.

As I observe, this latest upgrade seems poised to bring unprecedented performance enhancements and stunning graphical realism, further cementing our commitment to offering engaging, lifelike gaming experiences on a global scale.

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The forthcoming upgrade is likely to impact key partners such as NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, as they primarily depend on Microsoft’s technological resources for incorporating the newest innovations in their hardware and gaming solutions.

Additionally, I’d like to share further insights on cooperative vectors and neural rendering, a topic I delved into post the Advanced Graphics Summit at GDC that took place this past week, as Microsoft has also recently made these details available.

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) — What is it?

At the same Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2018, Microsoft launched DirectX Raytracing (DXR) as an additional feature for DirectX 12.

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The API serves as a bridge, enabling contemporary GPUs to execute ray tracing through DirectX, all while not interfering with conventional rasterization. Performance is evenly distributed between these two techniques.

As a tech enthusiast, I’m thrilled about the upcoming updates for the DXR 1.2! It’s going to bring some groundbreaking speed enhancements thanks to the introduction of two innovative technologies.

Here’s how Microsoft explains them:

  • Opacity micromaps significantly optimize alpha-tested geometry, delivering up to 2.3x performance improvement in path-traced games. By efficiently managing opacity data, OMM reduces shader invocations and greatly enhances rendering efficiency without compromising visual quality.
  • Shader execution reordering offers a major leap forward in rendering performance — up to 2x faster in some scenarios — by intelligently grouping shader execution to enhance GPU efficiency, reduce divergence, and boost frame rates, making raytraced titles smoother and more immersive than ever. This feature paves the way for more path-traced games in the future. 

The significant increase observed in this case is a 2.3 times boost in the performance of path-traced games when utilizing DXR 1.2 opacity micromaps.

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In simpler terms, when we use DXR 1.2 opacity micromaps in our path-traced games, we get an improvement in performance by about 2.3 times.

Path tracing is an advanced, resource-demanding variant of the ray tracing technique, undeniably placing higher demands on your graphics card’s processing capabilities than regular ray tracing does. This enhancement in performance is significant, not insignificant.

An additional significant improvement in performance is achieved through “up to twice as fast” rendering speed, which is a result of the optimization technique called shader execution reordering.

Apart from enhancing efficiency and elevating frame rates, this method is also anticipated by Microsoft to make path tracing more appealing in games, as it comes with a decrease in performance expenses.

Microsoft indicates that NVIDIA has agreed to provide driver support for their RTX GPUs, including models from the RTX 20-series. Meanwhile, they are collaborating with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to facilitate broad acceptance of these graphics solutions.

DXR 1.2 also comes to PIX on day one

PIX, a tool for game developers, is based on DirectX 12. It assists in troubleshooting and optimizing performance issues. From the get-go, it will support DXR 1.2.

Microsoft outlines a number of new tools for PIX:

  • PIX API Preview: A brand-new API giving developers programmatic access to PIX functionality and data via a D3D12-like API, available in C++, C# and Python. A private preview is coming in April 2025.
  • Custom Visualizers: Building on announcements over the past year, we announced new functionality to give unprecedented customization while viewing buffers, meshes, and textures inside the PIX UI.
  • PIX UX Refresh: A modernized, more intuitive, and more discoverable user experience is coming to PIX in April 2025! The many improvements include a new Visual Studio-like layout editor system, unlocking more PIX UI customization than ever before.

Microsoft shares key uses for neural rendering

It’s common knowledge that Microsoft, in collaboration with NVIDIA, is striving to incorporate neural rendering and collaborative vectors into DirectX.

Or simply: Microsoft, along with NVIDIA, aims to integrate neural rendering and cooperative vectors into DirectX, a well-known fact.

Additional details were disclosed at GDC 2025 earlier this week; this particular statement originated from the Direct3D development manager, Shawn Hargreaves.

Microsoft is planning to incorporate cooperative vector support into DirectX and HLSL from April onwards. This enhancement aims to revolutionize the field of graphics programming by facilitating neural rendering across the gaming industry. By utilizing Tensor Cores available on NVIDIA RTX, developers will be able to maximize the potential of RTX Neural Shaders, thereby creating more detailed, engaging experiences for Windows users.

Microsoft showed off how these technologies will directly affect game development and play:

  • Neural Block Texture Compression is a new graphics technique that dramatically reduces memory usage, while maintaining exceptional visual fidelity. Overall, our partners at Intel shared that by leveraging cooperative vectors to power advanced neural compression models, they saw a 10x speed up in inference performance.
  • Real-time path tracing can be enhanced by neural supersampling and denoising, combining two of the most cutting-edge graphics innovations to provide realistic visuals at practical performance levels.

So, how long do developers have to wait to get their hands on DXR 1.2?

In simple terms, Microsoft is planning to release the complete package which includes DXR 1.2, PIX updates, and cooperative vectors as part of the Agility SDK preview by late April. This means it won’t be too long before these features become available for testing.

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2025-03-21 16:40