Microsoft announced the release of DirectX 12 Agility SDK 1.620 Retail and 1.722 Preview, with ray tracing improvements it describes as its most substantial update since 2018, according to Wccftech.
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Illustrative image · Source: Wccftech · Microsoft Announces DirectX Raytracing Upgrade, Calls It Biggest Since 2018 · Rights unverified · Reencoded as WebP with metadata removed. Display may be resized or cropped.
Microsoft has announced the release of DirectX 12 Agility SDK 1.620 Retail and 1.722 Preview, introducing improvements to ray tracing, GPU efficiency, and Advanced Shader Delivery. The company describes the latest DirectX Raytracing (DXR) enhancements as its most substantial update since the technology debuted in 2018, according to Wccftech.
The headline additions in the 1.722 Preview are Clustered Geometry, Partitioned Top-Level Acceleration Structures, and GPU-driven acceleration structure builds, aimed at reducing the computational overhead of ray tracing complex, dynamic environments. Clustered Geometry splits geometry into smaller, reusable clusters containing up to 256 triangles and vertices each. PTLAS allows developers to update only the changed portions of a scene rather than rebuilding the entire top-level acceleration structure. The preview currently supports all GeForce RTX GPUs from NVIDIA, Radeon RX 9000 Series from AMD, and Intel Arc B-Series and supported Core Ultra integrated GPUs.
Wccftech reports that in one configuration running on an AMD Radeon RX 9070, switching to Clustered Geometry from a traditional Bottom-Level Acceleration Structure increased performance from 1.2 FPS to 79 FPS (roughly 66x faster), while reducing acceleration structure build times from 788 ms to 3.11 ms. Total acceleration structure memory consumption dropped by nearly 90%, from approximately 7.3 GiB to 774 MiB, although scratch memory requirements increased substantially. Microsoft emphasizes that these results come from a specific development sample and configuration, so performance improvements in actual games will depend heavily on the workload, implementation, and GPU architecture.
The retail Agility SDK 1.620 introduces improvements to Advanced Shader Delivery, including Partial Graphics Programs that allow developers to reuse precompiled shader components across multiple pipeline configurations. Advanced Shader Delivery is now broadly supported across the Windows 11 ecosystem, including compatible GPUs from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, although the Partial Graphics Programs optimization currently remains exclusive to Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 GPUs, with support from other vendors planned. Microsoft also confirmed that Shader Model 6.10 remains in preview, with its retail release planned alongside Agility SDK 1.621 in early December.
Microsoft confirmed that the ray tracing features require no fundamentally new hardware capabilities beyond existing ray-tracing support, although driver support remains necessary. Wccftech notes that these developments will not automatically improve performance in existing games, but provide developers with more efficient tools for implementing increasingly sophisticated rendering technologies in future PC titles.
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