Posted on Wednesday, October 30 2019 @ 11:27 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Microsoft's DirectX 12 will be getting a couple of new features in the new Windows 10 version that will be published in the first half of 2020. These features are currently available via the Windows 10 Insider Preview Builds (20H1) through the Windows Insider Program. The biggest change will be DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1, next there will also be a DirectX Mesh Shader, DirectX Sampler Feedback, Texture Streaming, Texture-Space Shading, and various other minor features. You can learn more at the
DirectX developer blog.
DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1
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.
At the same time, we continue to work with both GPU vendors and game developers to better expose hardware capabilities and to better address adoption pain points. As a result, we will introduce DXR tier 1.1 with the following new additions on top of tier 1.0.
Support for adding extra shaders to an existing Raytracing PSO, which greatly increases efficiency of dynamic PSO additions.
Support ExecuteIndirect for Raytracing, which enables adaptive algorithms where the number of rays is decided on the GPU execution timeline.
Introduce Inline Raytracing, which provides more direct control of the ray traversal algorithm and shader scheduling, a less complex alternative when the full shader-based raytracing system is overkill, and more flexibility since RayQuery can be called from every shader stage. It also opens new DXR use cases, especially in compute: culling, physics, occlusion queries, and so on.
DXR tier 1.1 is a superset of tier 1.0. Game developers should start building their raytracing solution based on the existing tier 1.0 APIs, then move up to tier 1.1 once they can better evaluate the benefit of tier 1.1. to their games.
