Microsoft DirectX Raytracing 1.2 update promises to boost game performance significantly

Forward-looking: Recent big game releases appear to confirm that ray tracing and path tracing are the future of graphics rendering. However, these techniques remain prohibitively computationally expensive. The next major update to Microsoft's DirectX API aims to address this and facilitate broader adoption of the technology. Microsoft's GDC presentation this week offered a glimpse into the future of DirectX ray tracing support. The company claims that DirectX Raytracing 1.2 could help developers double the performance of ray tracing and path tracing. Two key features underpin the update: opacity micromaps (OMM) and shader execution reordering (SER). OMM can help path-traced games run up to 2.3 times faster by reducing shader invocations and optimizing opacity data to enhance rendering efficiency. Meanwhile, SER intelligently groups shader execution to minimize divergence, improving performance by up to 2 times. Although ray tracing first emerged as a flashy extra feature in games li ... Read full article.