DirectX updates could boost ray tracing performance up to 90%

Ray tracing is a gee-wiz feature for the most powerful hardware out there, but you do need, well, powerful hardware in order to use it. Tricks like supersampling and frame generation can make it more accessible, but you’re still gonna take a performance hit to see the coolest, prettiest lighting effects. But the latest version of DirectX might help that performance—by a huge margin.

According to Microsoft engineer Amar Patel, the company is now testing newer versions of DirectX ray tracing that could boost performance in supported games on supported hardware. By how much? Somewhere between 40 and 90 percent, according to behind-the-curtains testing. The special sauce is the Shader Execution Reordering (SER) tool. In combination with other optimization tools, it can show a huge reduction in rendering for unnecessary lighting based on surfaces that reflect (or do not reflect) light in the engine.

“Using SER with the settings below running on an Nvidia RTX 4090 showed a 40 percent frame rate increase versus not using SER,” said Patel, “and a couple of configurations of Intel Arc B-Series GPUs each showed a 90 percent frame rate increase.” The increases were also seen in some lower-cost Intel GPUs. Microsoft is also working with AMD and Qualcomm for broader adoption.

This is some complex batch rendering tech with a lot of prerequisites, so it’s not like you can flip a switch in your driver and your games will look better. Most notably, it’ll require work from developers in order to support the DirectX 12 feature in their games.

We’ve been hearing about this for almost a year. As Windows Central reports, it’s mostly being seen in Microsoft’s own demos at the moment. But in conjunction with updates from Nvidia and AMD, it could create a big jump in high-end performance that PC gamers have been waiting on.