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Microsoft's Agility SDK: A Ray Tracing Game-Changer?
2 Mar
Summary
- Microsoft's Agility SDK update enhances ray tracing performance.
- Intel and Nvidia GPUs show significant FPS gains in tests.
- AMD GPUs may see limited benefits due to hardware limitations.

Microsoft's latest Agility SDK update introduces Shader Execution Reordering (SER), a feature poised to dramatically enhance ray tracing performance for graphics cards. In internal Microsoft testing, this innovation led to up to a 90% increase in frames per second on Intel Arc B-Series GPUs and a 40% boost on an Nvidia RTX 4090 when compared to standard ray sorting. Independent tests on an RTX 5080 also reported an 80% improvement.
While Intel and Nvidia GPUs are set to benefit immediately, AMD's RDNA GPUs face hardware limitations that prevent them from fully leveraging SER. Although AMD plans to implement the API, their current hardware lacks the necessary features for reordering. This suggests that any performance gains on AMD cards will be limited unless future GPU generations are designed with SER in mind. Widespread adoption by game developers could significantly impact future ray tracing experiences across various hardware platforms.




