Microsoft introduces DirectX ray-tracing preview for more efficient scene updates

What the sample numbers show

In Digital Foundry's account, William Judd reports that a Microsoft sample running on an AMD Radeon RX 9070 rose from 1.2 to 79 frames per second with clustered geometry. Acceleration-structure build time fell from 788 milliseconds to 3.11 milliseconds. Sebastian Castellanos of Wccftech reports that total acceleration-structure memory in that comparison fell from 7,519 MiB to 774 MiB, while temporary memory requirements for builds increased substantially. That memory figure describes acceleration structures, not a game's total video-memory use.

Hardware Busters' crmaris gives different figures for a Microsoft RX 9070 sample: 1.8 to 84 frames per second and 12,728 MiB to 774 MiB of acceleration-structure memory. The reports do not establish how the configurations behind those figures compare. Digital Foundry cautions that more complex real-world scenes will see smaller gains; Wccftech notes that results in games depend on the workload, implementation and GPU architecture. These are accounts of Microsoft's development samples, not independent tests of shipped games.

For developers, Microsoft lists matching Agility SDK 1.722.0 preview headers and runtime, a supporting driver, Shader Model 6.10 preview and Windows Developer Mode among the prerequisites. Its current hardware list includes all NVIDIA RTX GPUs, AMD Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs, Intel Arc B-Series graphics and specified Intel Core Ultra processors. Microsoft says the features require no new hardware capability beyond existing ray-tracing support, but support on some older GPUs depends on vendor driver work.