DirectX Developer Blog

DirectStorage 1.2 Available Now

April 18, 2023 Apr 18, 2023 04/18/23

Cassie Hoef, Damyan Pepper, Cooper Partin

Today we’re releasing the 1.2 version of the DirectStorage SDK, where we’ve added new features and made some fixes based on your feedback. The full list of changes can be found on the NuGet page and you can update to the latest version using NuGet update.    Visit the DirectStorage landing page for more information about how to ...

Agility SDK 1.610.3: Updated RenderPasses and minor Vulkan compatibility improvement

April 13, 2023 Apr 13, 2023 04/13/23

Amar Patel, Jesse Natalie

Contents: Updated RenderPasses Minor Vulkan compatibility improvements PIX support for these features Download here: Agility SDK Downloads Updated RenderPasses Background RenderPasses are an option for apps to organize rendering commands to be friendly to GPUs that need tile-based rendering to perform efficiently.  Ideally...

Agility SDK 1.710.0-preview: GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized Sampling

March 30, 2023 Mar 30, 2023 03/30/23

Zichuan Gong, Giancarlo Devich, David Cook

We’re pleased to announce that we have a new preview Agility SDK out today, letting developers experiment with two new features: GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized Sampling!  Head to Agility SDK Downloads to grab it.  GPU Upload Heaps  Introduction Historically a GPU’s VRAM was inaccessible to the CPU, forcing programs to have ...

Video acceleration API (VA-API) now available on Windows!

February 15, 2023 Feb 15, 2023 02/15/23

Sil Vilerino

Introduction What's VA-API? Originally developed by Intel, VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) is an open-source library and API specification, which provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing. It consists of a main library and driver-specific acceleration backends for each supported hardware vendor. Apps ...

Navigating the Redesigned Graphics Settings page

January 19, 2023 Jan 19, 2023 01/19/23

Wendy Ho

In the settings app, the graphics page lets you adjust settings related to ‘GPU Preference,’ ‘Auto HDR,’ ‘Optimizations for windowed games’, and more to get the most out of your graphics experience on your PC. Aligning with the new Windows 11 UI design, we’ve redesigned the graphics settings page to help you get to the settings ...

Updates in d3dx12.h: Nuget Packaging, Header Bloat Reduction, and D3DX12GetCopyableFootprints

January 6, 2023 Jan 6, 2023 01/6/23

Roland Shum

Hey everyone, we recently updated our d3dx12.h file! Previously, users were required to head to DirectX-Headers repo to grab the nice d3dx12.h helper files. The recent Agility SDK 1.608.2 release bundles this repo with the Nuget packages! There are no differences between the two packages.   Header Bloat Reduction   Next, ...

DirectStorage GDeflate Reference Implementation Now Available

December 13, 2022 Dec 13, 2022 12/13/22

Cassie Hoef, Damyan Pepper

The GDeflate reference implementation is now available from the DirectStorage repo on GitHub. Developers can use this to easily integrate GDeflate into their asset compression tool chains and build compatible compressors. The compression and decompression algorithms are open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. How to Build: The GDeflate ...

Agility SDK 1.608.0: Enhanced Barriers and more

November 18, 2022 Nov 18, 2022 11/18/22

Jacques van Rhyn, Bill Kristiansen, Giancarlo Devich

We’ve published another Agility SDK, version 1.608.0.  This Agility SDK has support for Enhanced Barriers, and a few minor DX12 features. That’s right: these features no longer require developer mode to run on your machine! Head to Agility SDK Downloads to grab it. Enhanced Barriers For an overview of Enhanced Barriers, please see ...

DirectStorage 1.1 Now Available

November 7, 2022 Nov 7, 2022 11/7/22

Cassie Hoef, Damyan Pepper

The DirectStorage team is pleased to share that GPU decompression with DirectStorage 1.1 is available now. This new version of DirectStorage contains everything a developer needs to get started with GPU decompression. For more information on this feature and how it benefits gamers, check out our previous blog post: DirectStorage 1.1 Coming ...

Opening HLSL Planning

October 20, 2022 Oct 20, 2022 10/20/22

Chris Bieneman

Since early 2017, the DirectX Shader Compiler (DXC) has been open source and available on GitHub. DXC is based on the LLVM 3.7 release of Clang, which enables compiler-driven IDE integrations, powerful language tooling, and has empowered HLSL to grow as a language to include highly requested features like C++ templates and operator ...