Microsoft has updated its Agility SDK to version 1.619, introducing DirectX Shader Model 6.9 and new DirectX 12 enhancements that center on a feature called shader execution reordering, or SER. With SER, the application programming interface gives applications the ability to dynamically sort rays for highly optimized parallel execution, which improves ray tracing performance by aligning similar workloads and reducing idle hardware cycles. The technology is being showcased in a dedicated Direct3D 12 demonstration that highlights how much ray tracing performance can improve when ray processing is reordered more intelligently.
In Microsoft testing, Intel Arc B-Series GPUs, which include ‘Battlemage’ discrete graphics and Xe3-based integrated graphics in ‘Panther Lake,’ managed to achieve a 90% framerate increase in the technology demonstration, indicating that ray tracing on this architecture benefits significantly from more efficient ray scheduling. The company also tested the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with shader execution reordering enabled, and the GeForce RTX 4090 with SER scored a 40% improvement over the default ray sorting in the previous execution model, underscoring that even high end existing hardware can see substantial uplift from the new approach.
Independent testing from Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein on X showed that the GeForce RTX 5080 ‘Blackwell’ GPU scored about an 80% improvement running this demo, providing external confirmation that SER can dramatically raise ray tracing performance on next generation Nvidia hardware. Microsoft has built the D3D12RaytracingHelloShaderExecutionReordering demo as a minimal implementation of the technology, allowing developers and enthusiasts to test their own hardware and directly measure the performance improvement. These results suggest that as game engines adopt shader execution reordering on DirectX 12, players with compatible Intel and Nvidia GPUs could see substantially higher ray traced frame rates without changing hardware.
