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!