In April 2021, Microsoft released the first version of its Agility SDK. It allows PC gaming developers to add more advanced DirectX 12 Ultimate API features to their games at a faster rate. It also allows Windows PC gamers to get these new features without having to update their Windows OS. This week, Microsoft released a preview version of a new Agility SDK release that adds some new features for game developers.
In a blog post, Microsoft stated the Agility SDK v1.711.3 preview release adds support for Work Graphs. It says:
This first release of work graphs allows compute shaders to request other compute shaders to run asynchronously, for tasks such as culling, binning or chaining of compute work. These work requests can include a data payload if desired, managed by the system.
Hardware has flexibility to schedule work efficiently without the developer needing to understand the specifics of every device. The programming model is easier to use and more flexible in many ways than the existing serial ExecuteIndirect model for GPU work generation.
More information on Work Graphs can be found in this dedicated blog post.
The new Agility SDK preview also adds support for Wave Matrix. Here"s what Microsoft says about that:
GPUs and compute devices have begun adding dedicated silicon to their hardware to support matrix multiplication at higher bandwidths for usage in machine learning and imaging applications. To allow access to this dedicated silicon, HLSL is adding Wave Matrix instructions to the language, also known as Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WaveMMA). This addition defines several new abstract Wave Matrix data types, which allows the underlying hardware to store, rearrange, and duplicate data across all threads in a wave.
The blog post says AMD will release a new version of its Adrenalin Edition driver with WaveMMA support in the near future. Developers with Intel and NVIDIA GPUs should contact their developer representative, while future support is planned for Qualcomm GPUs.
Finally, the new Agility SDK preview adds support for encoding AV1 video on GPUs. Right now, it"s available on NVIDIA RTX 40 series GPUs with the driver version of 545.31 or later. Support for AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series GPUs is coming in late 2023. Developers with Intel GPUs should contact their developer representative, and future support for this feature is planned for Qualcomm GPUs.
You can download the new Agility SDK v1.711.3 preview release right here.