Microsoft announced the presentation of DirectX Raytracing (DXR) version 1.2 at the GDC 2025 conference, according to pepelac.news. This update promises to significantly enhance performance and visual quality in games. The update will impact Microsoft’s partners — NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm — as they will use the corporation's tools to integrate the latest technologies into their hardware and games.
DXR 1.2 is an addition to DirectX 12 and includes two new technologies that significantly improve performance:
Opacity Micromaps (OMM): This technology optimizes geometry that has passed alpha testing, increasing the efficiency of ray tracing in games by up to 2.3 times.
Shader Execution Reordering (SER): This technology doubles the speed of rendering, enhancing the efficiency of the GPU.
These innovations, along with increasing performance and frame rates, make ray tracing in games more appealing, as they reduce the demand for high-performance graphics cards. According to Microsoft, NVIDIA will support these updates in the drivers for its RTX 20xx series of graphics processors and is also working with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to widely implement the new technology.
In addition to the updates in DXR, Microsoft also announced new tools for PIX — a tool used by game developers for production and performance tuning in DirectX 12. The update is scheduled for release in April 2025 and will include a new API for PIX, allowing programmatic access to PIX functions and data in C++, C#, and Python languages, as well as improved user
