DirectX


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DirectX 12 Ultimate is Microsoft’s latest graphics API, which codifies NVIDIA RTX’s innovative technologies first introduced in 2018, as the cross-platform standard for next-generation, real-time graphics. It offers APIs for Ray Tracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shading, Sampler Feedback, and more, enabling developers to implement cinema-quality reflections, shadows, and lighting in games and real-time applications.




"DirectX 12 Ultimate unlocks the latest in graphics hardware technology with support for ray tracing, mesh shaders, and variable rate shading. It’s the new gold standard for the next generation of games.”
- Marcus Wassmer, Director of Engineering, Graphics, Epic Games

“By investing in next-gen graphics features using DirectX 12 Ultimate, we know our work will benefit gamers on PC and future consoles, and the game will look the way we dreamed.”
- Anton Yudintsev, CEO, Gaijin Entertainment

Ray Tracing


Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) API extends DirectX 12 to support real-time ray tracing, allowing developers to combine ray tracing with traditional rasterization and compute techniques. DirectX Raytracing enables cinematic reflections, shadows, and lighting in games and real-time applications, while taking full advantage of NVIDIA RTX’s dedicated ray tracing cores.

Learn more about RTX ray tracing


NVIDIA Developer News
Ray Tracing Essentials Part 1: Basics of Ray Tracing

Ray Tracing Essentials is a seven-part video series hosted by the editor of Ray Tracing Gems, NVIDIA’s Eric Haines. Watch all of the videos in the series starting with the basics of ray tracing.

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NVIDIA Developer News
Ray Tracing in 4A’s Metro Exodus and Remedy’s Control

At GDC 2019, NVIDIA’s Martin Stich walked attendees through ray tracing in 4A’s Metro: Exodus and Remedy’s Control on PC. Watch his talk and many more.

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NVIDIA Developer Blog
Tips and Tricks: Ray Tracing Best Practices

This post presents best practices for implementing ray tracing in games and other real-time graphics applications. We present these as briefly as possible to help you quickly find ...

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NVIDIA Developer Blog
DX12 Raytracing tutorial - Part 1

Welcome to Part 1 of the DirectX 12 DXR ray tracing tutorial. The focus of these documents and the provided code is to showcase a basic integration of raytracing within ...

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Mesh Shading


Mesh shading advances NVIDIA’s geometry processing architecture by offering a new shader model for the vertex, tessellation, and geometry shading stages of the graphics pipeline, supporting more flexible and efficient approaches for computation of geometry. This more flexible model makes it possible, for example, to support an order of magnitude more objects per scene, by moving the key performance bottleneck of object list processing off the CPU and into highly parallel GPU mesh shading programs. Mesh shading also enables new algorithms for GPU-driven culling and object LOD management.


NVIDIA Developer News
Introduction to Turing Mesh Shaders

The Turing architecture introduces a new programmable geometric shading pipeline through the use of mesh shaders. The new shaders bring the compute programming model to the graphics pipeline as threads are used cooperatively to generate ...

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NVIDIA Developer Blog
NVIDIA Asteroids Mesh Shading Demo

The NVIDIA Asteroids demo showcases how the mesh shading technology built into NVIDIA’s Turing GPU architecture can dramatically improve performance and image quality when rendering a substantial number of very complex objects in a scene.

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GDC 2019 Talk
Asteroids Mesh Shading with DX12

We discuss the practical implementation of "in-pipe" GPU culling and level of detail alogithms with Turing's new mesh shading technology. We will use the context of the DX12 Asteroids demo to demonstrate how programmable shading ...

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Variable Rate Shading


Variable Rate Shading (VRS) allows developers to control shading rate dynamically, shading as little as once per sixteen pixels or as often as eight times per pixel. The application specifies shading rate using a combination of a shading-rate surface and a per-primitive (triangle) value. VRS is a very powerful tool that allows developers to shade more efficiently, reducing work in regions of the screen where full resolution shading would not give any visible image quality benefit, and therefore improving frame rate. Several classes of VRS-based algorithms have already been identified, which can vary shading work based on content level of detail (Content Adaptive Shading), rate of content motion (Motion Adaptive Shading), and for VR applications, lens resolution and eye position (Foveated Rendering).

Learn more about VRS


NVIDIA Developer Blog
What is NVIDIA Adaptive Shading? Demystifying The Turing Feature That Boosts FPS Up To 15%

With the Turing architecture, we support a new feature called Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which is broadly accessible to developers...

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NVIDIA Developer Blog
Easy VRS Integration with Eye Tracking

VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) continue to dramatically improve with each generation. Resolution, refresh rate, field of view, and other features bring unique challenges to the table.

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NVIDIA Developer Blog
NVIDIA Variable Rate Shading Demonstrated in Autodesk VRED

We introduced Variable Rate Shading (VRS) last year with the Turing architecture. This new, easy to implement rendering technique allows developers to vary the amount of ...

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NVIDIA Blog
ZeroLight Improves Automotive Product Visualisation Quality and Performance with VRS

ZeroLight’s proprietary visualisation platform is used across the automotive industry. Offering real-time product rendering, hyper-realistic ...

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Sampler Feedback


Sampler Feedback shares the same philosophy as Variable Rate Shading: work smarter to reduce GPU load and improve performance. It is enabled by a hardware capability in our Turing architecture called Texture Space Shading. Developers can use Texture Space Shading to efficiently shade static objects at a lower rate (for example, every third frame) and reuse the object’s colors as calculated in previous frames. This work reuse can be combined with ray tracing, especially in the case of global illumination, which is a common example of a slow-changing and very expensive shading computation.


NVIDIA Developer Blog
Turing Texture Space Shading

Turing GPUs introduce a new shading capability called Texture Space Shading (TSS), where shading values are dynamically computed and stored in a texture as texels in a texture space.

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