Microsoft Previews New DirectX 12 Features: Raytracing 1.1, Mesh Shader, and More

[Tsing]

Improvements to DirectX 12 have gone live in the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview Build (20H1). Game developers may download the latest shader compiler to test out DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1, which adds support for extra shaders, adaptive algorithms, and Inline Raytracing. Microsoft says that DXR has already ushered in a "cinematic level of photorealism" to a long list of games.

DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1

• Support for adding extra shaders to an existing Raytracing PSO, which greatly increases efficiency of dynamic PSO additions.
• Support ExecuteIndirect for Raytracing, which enables adaptive algorithms where the number of rays is decided on the GPU execution timeline.
• Introduce Inline Raytracing, which provides more direct control of the ray traversal algorithm and shader scheduling, a less complex alternative when the full shader-based raytracing system is overkill, and more flexibility since RayQuery can be called from every shader stage. It also opens new DXR use cases, especially in compute: culling, physics, occlusion queries, and so on.

All these new features come from extensive discussions and collaborations with both game developers and GPU vendors. We are looking forward to working with game developers to use these features to bring their games to the next level of rendering quality and performance!

 

[Dogsofjune]

It's nice that Microsoft is onboard with Nvidia Ray traceing

 

[AntiQuark]

It's nice that Microsoft is onboard with Nvidia Ray traceing

This looks to have more to do with supporting AMDs upcoming shader based DXR and broadening of features/reducing overhead.

 

[Dogsofjune]

Even better

 

[Zarathustra]

So, is DX12 being treated just like Windows 10? Just keep using the same number and keep adding features?

 

[Brian_B]

So, is DX12 being treated just like Windows 10? Just keep using the same number and keep adding features?

Isn't that what they did with DX10 and 11 as well? Even 9 to some degree, although not as bad.

 

[Phasenoise]

Yes, there were a number of revisions and tiers in earlier API levels as well.

This is a natural evolution of a major API. Typically both HW and SW vendors realize where the pressure points are in the current API once they really start to work with it in earnest. They like to incrementally extend the API in an optional way to allow future HW and SW to take advantage of it, but it's not a real API roll.