Microsoft ships biggest DirectX Raytracing upgrade since 2018

Microsoft released DirectX 12 Agility SDK 1.620 Retail and 1.722 Preview with Clustered Geometry, Partitioned TLAS and GPU-driven acceleration structure builds. In a demo on Radeon RX 9070, Clustered Geometry lifted performance from 1.2 to 79 FPS and cut acceleration structure memory by nearly 90%. The features run on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs with existing ray tracing hardware but need updated drivers.

• Clustered Geometry splits geometry into reusable clusters of up to 256 triangles and vertices
• RX 9070 demo: 1.2 to 79 FPS, build time down from 788 ms to 3.11 ms
• Acceleration structure memory fell from ~7.3 GiB to 774 MiB
• Partial Graphics Programs in SDK 1.620 currently limited to Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000