To help developers boost the quality of their rendering and performance, Microsoft announced a suite of new graphics features, now available in Windows 10 Insider Preview Builds (20H1) through the Windows Insider Program.
“Back in October 2018, we released Windows 10 OS and SDK to support DirectX Raytracing (aka. DXR tier 1.0). Within one year of its official release, game developers used DXR to bring cinematic level of photorealism in real time to a long list of games,” said Microsoft.
DXR tier 1.1 provides support for adding extra shaders to an existing ray tracing PSO, increasing the efficiency of dynamic PSO additions. Developers will receive ExecuteIndirect support for ray tracing, which enables adaptive algorithms where the number of rays is decided on the GPU execution timeline. Inline Raytracing has been added, which allows for more direct control of the ray traversal algorithm and shader scheduling.
DirectX Mesh Shaders, a new feature introduced in Insider Build 20H1, removes the input assembler bottleneck, and offers flexible tessellation, instancing, and procedural generation capabilities.
DirectX Sampler Feedback, another new feature, lets engineers capture and record texture sampling info and locations, all done in hardware.
Developers targeting NVIDIA RTX GPUS will be able to take the greatest advantage of Microsoft’s software improvements, given the product range’s RT Cores for accelerating ray tracing and hardware support for mesh shaders.
To learn more, go to Microsoft’s Developer Blog.
