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Announcing DirectX Raytracing 1.2, PIX, Neural Rendering and more at GDC 2025! - DirectX Developer Blog
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...
devblogs.microsoft.com
DirectX Raytracing 1.2: Game-Changing Performance Boosts
DXR 1.2 introduces two revolutionary technologies: opacity micromaps (OMM) and shader execution reordering (SER), both of which deliver substantial leaps in raytracing performance:
- 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.
Cooperative Vectors & Neural Rendering: Next-Generation Realism
At Monday’s Advanced Graphics Summit session on neural rendering, we shared more details of our support for cooperative vectors. Cooperative vectors are a brand-new programming feature coming soon in Shader Model 6.9. It introduces powerful new hardware acceleration for vector and matrix operations, enabling developers to efficiently integrate neural rendering techniques directly into real-time graphics pipelines.
With help on stage from our partners at Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, we highlighted key use cases for the technology:
- 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.
- NVIDIA unveiled that their Neural Shading SDK will support DirectX and utilize cooperative vectors, providing developers with tools to easily integrate neural rendering techniques, significantly improving visual realism without sacrificing performance.
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