Microsoft, as part of the Windows Insider preview early access program, has introduced updated APIs for DirectX 12 and detailed the new features. These capabilities will appear in a release next year and include three main functions.
The first feature concerns ray tracing. It was initially part of DirectX 12, but now it has been expanded. Specifically, additional shaders have been added to the existing ray tracing pipeline state object (PSO). This boosts performance.
Next, we should mention the adaptive ExecuteIndirect algorithms. According to the description, this capability allows determining the number of rays on the GPU execution timeline. Finally, a lightweight version of ray tracing has been introduced.
Microsoft has also worked on geometry. In the DirectX 12 API, support for mesh shaders has been added. This function is called DirectX Sampler. It allows identifying which textures are most frequently available and should remain in memory. As a result, only the currently needed data is stored in the video memory.
Thus, the new feature will eliminate the annoying long loading times of virtual worlds. This is called texture streaming technology.
More details can be found in the Microsoft developers' blog. It is worth noting that a few days ago, AMD positively on this topic and hinted at the imminent arrival of new features in Radeon products. Clearly, they will appear in the new high-end graphics cards expected to be released in 2020, which are rumored to include hardware support for ray tracing.
Source: 3dnews.ru
