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Microsoft unveiled significant advancements in DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2 at GDC 2025, addressing core performance bottlenecks that have traditionally hindered ray tracing adoption. Moreover, it announced that DirectX 12 will soon support neural rendering and cooperative vectors, but it should still take some time before we see them in action.
As Wccftech brought to our attention, Opacity Micromaps (OMM) and Shader Execution Reordering (SER) are the two key technologies that promise to improve ray tracing efficiency the most. OMM tackles the computational overhead associated with alpha-tested geometry by storing pre-computed opacity data, eliminating unnecessary ray-geometry intersection tests. On the other hand, SER mitigates the GPU inefficiencies caused by incoherent ray behaviour by dynamically grouping shader invocations with similar execution paths, reducing thread divergence.
These advancements represent a shift from brute-force computational approaches toward more sophisticated resource management, with Microsoft claiming performance improvements of up to 2.3x for OMM and 2x for SER. However, note that both OMM and SER are hardware-dependent features. While Nvidia has pledged support for RTX GPUs, the implementation timelines from other hardware manufacturers remain uncertain.
Furthermore, Microsoft's Shader Model 6.9 introduces cooperative vectors, a hardware acceleration design that significantly enhances matrix computation performance. This feature promises to deliver a remarkable 10x speedup in neural texture compression while reducing memory footprint by up to 75% compared to conventional methods. This can bring computationally intensive graphics within reach of mid-range consumer hardware.
The new Agility SDK's preview release, which includes the Raytracing 1.2 update, will only be available in April 2025. Considering developers will likely require months to integrate it, final products using these technologies are likely still some months away from being available to the general public.
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KitGuru says: Do you think the Raytracing update 1.2 will deliver on its promises and make the feature more accessible and less resource-intensive to systems?
