TECH NEWS – Almost unnoticed, Microsoft has rolled out an update that could benefit millions of PC players. Direct3D 12 Shader Model 6.9 formalizes two tools that reduce the cost of ray tracing. Without making a big show of it, Microsoft is refreshing a core technology that PC gamers will actually feel.

If you play on PC, it is worth paying attention to this one, because the change is more relevant than it sounds at first glance. You may not know the exact details of what Direct3D is, but the basic idea is simple: Direct3D is essentially the “language” a game uses to talk to your graphics card and tell it what to render and how. When Microsoft updates this graphics API (part of DirectX), developers get new ways to squeeze more out of your hardware without you having to do anything as the player.

Ray Tracing Should Be Less Demanding

Over the last few days, Microsoft has updated Direct3D 12 to Shader Model 6.9 and officially included two tools called Opacity Micromaps and Shader Execution Reordering. They share the same end goal: make ray tracing in games less resource-hungry and faster on your GPU. Ray tracing remains extremely demanding, and that is exactly where these technologies come in, helping developers optimize and giving players a more usable RT experience.

With this update, developers now have two official, standardized Direct3D tools to reduce how hard ray tracing hits your graphics card. Opacity Micromaps lowers the cost of rendering semi-transparent geometry such as leaves, fences, or glass, while Shader Execution Reordering restructures the way the GPU schedules work so it wastes fewer processing cycles. The outcome is the same from a player perspective: better performance with ray tracing enabled, or the same image quality while asking for fewer resources.

The most interesting part is that neither feature is actually new on NVIDIA hardware. Both have been compatible since the RTX 4000 series and have already shown up in games like Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. What changes now is that Microsoft is folding them into the official Direct3D 12 standard. That effectively pushes AMD and Intel to implement them in their next GPU generations if they want to meet the standard, meaning these improvements will no longer be confined to NVIDIA’s ecosystem and should spread to far more graphics cards over the coming years. It is not the biggest headline in the world, but it does mean future games could run ray tracing more efficiently.

Source: 3djuegos