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Next DirectX update shows further support for ray tracing

Next DirectX update shows further support for ray tracing

The new DirectX update by Microsoft has advanced ray tracing support for developers.

As announced in a blog post, the new update includes new shaders for Raytracing PSO, support of ExecuteIndirect for Raytracing, and the introduction of Inline Raytracing - it offers better control over ray algorithms and shader scheduling.

“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,” wrote Microsoft program manager Jianye Lu.

“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.”

On top of this, mesh and amplification shaders will replace the current shader stages - vertex, hull, tessellator and domain - in the next generation.

“The main goal of the mesh shader is to increase the flexibility and performance of the geometry pipeline,” said Lu.

“Mesh shaders use cooperative groups of threads (similar to a compute shader) to process small batches of vertices and primitives before the rasterizer, with choice of input data layout, compression, geometry amplification, and culling being entirely determined by shader code.”

Lu continued: “There is also a new amplification shader stage, which enables tessellation, instancing, and additional culling scenarios.

“The flexibility and high performance of the mesh shader programming model will allow game developers to increase geometric detail, rendering more complex scenes without sacrificing framerate.”

 


Staff Writer

Kayleigh is the Staff Writer for PocketGamer.biz. Besides PGbiz and PCGI she has written as a list writer for Game Rant, rambling about any and all things games related. You can also find her on Twitter talking utter nonsense.