Microsoft announced DirectX Raytracing 1.2 at GDC 2025, revealing the latest update co-developed with NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. Love it or hate it ray tracing has become commonplace with most AAA games and its features and means of implementation continue to expand. The biggest and most obvious downside to its usage remains the vast amount of computational workloads it places upon a GPU thus tanking framerates and making native resolution rendering out of reach for many wanting 60 or more FPS.
NVIDIA has led the pack with its hardware-based DLSS technologies which has proven very effective in providing high frame rates and is the first to officially announce it will support DirectX Raytracing 1.2 with its RTX GPUs. AMD and Intel each continue to update their software-based upscaling solutions which also assist in heavy RT workloads to increase framerates. Intel announced it will support Shader execution reordering via a future SDK release while Opacity micromaps via upcoming hardware releases. Qualcomm, who has been making its own Windows-supported CPUs, said it plans to support both OMM and SER as well.
At the crux for all GPU manufacturers is Microsoft’s DirectX 12 Ultimate which introduced DirectX Raytracing features to Windows. DirectX Raytracing 1.2 is the latest iteration and according to Microsoft and its partners, it will bring major improvements; in some case scenarios, performance gains could be anywhere from 2x to 10x.
Per Microsoft (via official announcement):
- 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.
- 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 extended its gratitude to AMD Software Engineer Max Oberberger for assistance in showcasing “power of work graphs with mesh nodes” and a demo that will be posted on the Microsoft Dev channel at a future point. Control/Alan Wake developer Remedy also received an honorable mention for its engagement in testing and feedback with the updated Opacity micromaps and Shader execution reodering features.