DirectX Developer Blog
The latest news on Microsoft's Graphics and Display technology
Latest posts
DirectX Dump Files are now ready for your retail games
At GDC 2026, we shared our vision for bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows, and in June we released the DirectX Dump Files public preview. Thank you to everyone who tried the preview and sent us feedback. Today, DirectX Dump Files are ready for your retail games. Starting with Agility SDK 1.620 and PIX 2610.28, you can capture GPU crashes on your players' PCs and on your own machines, then investigate them in PIX using one consistent workflow across hardware vendors. We couldn't have done this alone. DirectX Dump Files bring together data from Windows, Direct3D, and each hardware vendor's d...
Announcing Agility SDK 1.620 Retail and 1.722 Preview: DirectX Dump Files, Partial Graphics Programs, and So Much More!
Today, we are pleased to announce the release of Agility SDK 1.620 retail and Agility SDK 1.722-preview! Agility SDK 1.620 brings DirectX Dump Files to retail, along with Fence Barriers Tier 1, the Batched Asynchronous Command List APIs, and Partial Graphics Programs. Meanwhile, Agility SDK 1.722-preview introduces major updates to DirectX Raytracing capabilities for highly detailed, dynamic scenes. Here's the list of everything in Agility SDK 1.620: And here's what's new in Agility SDK 1.722-preview: Quick note: Shader Model 6.10 remains in preview for t...
[PREVIEW] Raytracing: Clustered Geometry, Partitioned TLAS, Indirect Acceleration Structure Builds
Today we're introducing a preview of DirectX Raytracing (DXR) Clustered Geometry and Partitioned Top-Level Acceleration Structures (PTLAS), with a unified GPU-driven API for building and updating them. This is part of a larger AgilitySDK release described in the parent post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/agilitysdk-1-620-retail-and-1-722-preview/ For DXR this is the most significant update since its debut in 2018. Here's the motivation for Clustered Geometry and Partitioned TLAS: At object level scope within a scene, animation, streaming, and generated geometry can repeatedly incur the cost...
Async Commands Fallback Layer
We're pleased to announce that Agility SDK 1.620.1 includes a fallback layer for Batched Async Commands, letting developers use the new commands on hardware that doesn't support them natively. You can find the NuGet package here. Background Batched Async Commands were introduced in the Agility SDK 1.720 Preview as a new set of copy, fill, clear, and resolve commands. The legacy versions of these operations are implicitly serialized, since the original resource barrier model has no way to say that two copies don't depend on each other. The batched versions drop that implicit serialization and take many operation...
Advanced Shader Delivery is Available Now Across Hardware and Coming Soon to Other Storefronts
A few weeks ago, we announced that Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) is available for Gears of War: E-Day and teased that the feature is coming to devices across Windows 11. Today, we’re proud to announce that Advanced Shader Delivery is broadly available across the Windows ecosystem on devices powered by AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm! ASD addresses a PC ecosystem wide challenge by delivering shaders at download of a title- reducing overall loading time, reducing shader stutter in game, and saving on power consumption. Check out the system requirements below for supported hardware and graphics drivers. &nbs...
Advanced Shader Delivery Coming Soon across Windows 11 and Available for Gears of War: E-Day Today
In May, we expanded the public preview of Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) across the AMD RDNA™ graphics architecture line. This month, we’re extending ASD to additional Windows devices powered by Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. To kickoff this rollout, we’re showcasing ASD support for Gears of War: E-Day. Advanced Shader Delivery tackles two common PC gaming challenges: long first-launch wait times and shader-related stutter. By delivering precompiled shaders with the game download, ASD reduces the amount of shader work a player’s CPU has to do when the game starts. That helps games launch faster and reduces stutt...
Introducing DxTimingCaptureLibrary
Today we released DxTimingCaptureLibrary, an open-source C++ library for DirectX developers. It is available on GitHub under the MIT license, and it works on all versions of Windows 10 and 11. DxTimingCaptureLibrary makes it easier to understand DirectX ETW events and bring their rich information into tools such as in-engine game profilers. What is DxTimingCaptureLibrary? ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) is a Windows feature for collecting detailed system and application events with low overhead. DirectX components such as the D3D12 runtime, DXGI, and the DirectX kernel emit ETW events when importan...
Auto SR Comes to Intel Core Ultra Series-3 Processors
Today, we’re excited to announce we’re expanding the availability of Auto SR to Intel Core Ultra Series 3-based Copilot+ PCs. This builds off our previous expansion of Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) to support more gaming devices allowing more players to leverage Auto SR as a tool in their toolkit to better optimize games for improved experience. Download the Auto Super Resolution Package - Microsoft Apps to get started. Auto SR is designed to help games that struggle to hit playable frame rates at higher resolutions by allowing the game to render at a lower resolution, then using NPU-based upscaling ...
DirectX Dump Files Preview Now Available!
At this year’s GDC, we shared our vision for bringing console‑level GPU developer tools to Windows. As part of that announcement, we introduced DirectX Dump Files as a major step forward in GPU crash debugging on Windows. Today, we’re excited to make our DirectX Dump Files public preview available to developers! If you missed our GDC announcement, it’s now available in the GDC Vault: Bringing Console-Level GPU Tooling to Windows You can also read our announcement blog: DirectX: Bringing Console‑Level Developer Tools to Windows For instructions on how to get started today, see our Getting Started secti...
