Microsoft has issued two pivotal updates to its DirectX Agility SDK, introducing a host of features that significantly advance real-time graphics and resource management. The 1.717-preview release debuts Shader Execution Reordering (SER) and Cooperative Vectors, while the stable 1.616-retail SDK brings Opacity Micromaps (OMM) and D3D12 Tiled Resource Tier 4 support. These changes collectively aim to unlock smoother ray tracing workflows, greater efficiency for Artificial Intelligence effects in games, and more robust handling of complex visual scenes.
The hallmark addition in 1.717-preview, Cooperative Vectors, finally offers dedicated hardware acceleration for fundamental vector and matrix operations. This update empowers developers to shift workload-heavy calculations for neural rendering or similar effects from the CPU directly to the GPU, enabling richer, real-time Artificial Intelligence-driven visuals. Complementing this, Shader Execution Reordering tackles a long-standing inefficiency in ray tracing—by reorganizing shader thread execution on the fly, it minimizes wasted computation time caused by thread divergence. Early internal testing from Microsoft reveals performance improvements up to twofold in path-traced scenarios, suggesting major gains for upcoming titles that leverage these features. Video encoding also receives a boost, with new options like a HEVC Reference List extension for extended reference frames, two-pass low-resolution pre-encoding, and built-in PSNR metrics for assessing output quality.
The simultaneous 1.616-retail update centers on Opacity Micromaps, a feature engineered to optimize rendering of alpha-tested geometry such as foliage, grids, or fences. OMM allows modern GPUs to bypass unnecessary ´AnyHit´ shader invocations, cutting overhead and granting up to 2.3x speed increases in path-traced scenes, as demonstrated in NVIDIA´s own benchmarks. For now, only NVIDIA RTX graphics cards support OMM at the driver level, with AMD and Intel committed to rolling out compatible updates later this year and next. In addition, D3D12 Tiled Resource Tier 4 finally removes earlier restrictions on packed mipmaps within texture arrays, granting developers finer control over texture streaming and memory usage along with more freedom when writing shaders. Intel is already shipping drivers compatible with Tier 4, NVIDIA has confirmed support, and AMD aims to join by June 2025.
