Microsoft has announced its updated DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2 alongside next-gen Neural Rendering support across NVIDIA, Intel & AMD hardware.
DirectX Raytracing 1.2 (DXR) & Neural Rendering Announced at GDC, Support Across AMD, Intel & NVIDIA Hardware
At GDC, Microsoft is unveiling some big updates to its software suite for Windows, which come in the form of DirectX Raytracing 1.2, PIX, Neural Rendering, and more. These technologies will pave the way for the next generation of visual fidelity while focusing on some big performance uplifts for all.
Starting with DXR 1.2 (DirectX Raytracing), Microsoft is introducing two new technologies which include OMM (opacity micromaps) and SER (shader execution reordering), which will help deliver huge performance boosts.
- 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.
DXR 1.2 aims to deliver up to 40% improvements in performance during complex scenes as demoed within Remedy's Alan Wake 2 which was showcased at GDC with the latest tech while delivering substantially detailed raytraced visuals.
The company states that NVIDIA has already embraced these two cutting-edge features and will enable driver support across GeForce RTX GPUs while they are also working with AMD, Intel and Qualcomm for wider adoption.
Another major aspect that is being introduced by Microsoft is support for cooperative vectors, which is a brand-new programming feature coming to Shader Model 6.9, very soon. With these cooperative vectors, developers can leverage new hardware acceleration engines for vector and matrix operations, allowing them to integrate neural rendering techniques directly within the graphics pipeline.
All major hardware vendors, including NVIDIA, AMD, & Intel, are on board the Cooperative Vectors and Neural Rendering train:
- 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.
Microsoft will also be delivering updates to Windows WARP (Advanced Rasterization Platform). WARP, a CPU-based software renderer for DirectX, will get enhanced capabilities and performance updates. This renderer runs solely on the CPU and requires no GPU, making it perfect for systems without compatible GPUs for diagnostics. WARP will now be fully compliant with DX12 Ultimate and will get support for all the latest features such as raytracing, mesh shaders and work graphs.
In addition to this, Microsoft will also have day-one support for DirectX Raytracing 1.2 (DXR) within their DirectX debugger and profile known as PIX, on Windows. All three technologies are going to be available in the preview Agility SDK which lands in late April 2025. The following are some of the demos showcasing the use of Neural Rendering within tech demos:
