Microsoft pushed out a new DirectX 12 “Agility SDK” release, and the headline is Shader Model 6.9 going retail.

If you do not follow DirectX tooling, the Agility SDK is basically a way for Microsoft to ship newer DirectX 12 features without waiting for a full Windows update. Games can bundle the newer runtime, then you only need a compatible GPU driver and hardware support. There are two parts here. Agility SDK 1.619 is the retail release. Agility SDK 1.719-preview is a separate preview build with a few extra features that are still in testing.

Shader Model 6.9 is mostly about the shader language and minimum feature requirements. Shader Model is the “feature level” for HLSL shaders, which is the language developers use to write GPU programs for DirectX. SM 6.9 adds “Long Vectors”, meaning shaders can work with vectors longer than 4 elements, up to 1024, without awkward packing.

Some things that used to be optional are now required for SM 6.9 capable hardware , mainly native 16-bit shader ops, wave operations, and 64-bit integer ops.

Ray tracing gets two items called out under DXR 1.2. Opacity Micromaps are now treated as fully released, with the last HLSL piece no longer marked preview. These help with alpha tested geometry, think fences, foliage, and other cutout textures, which can be expensive in ray tracing because they often fall back to costly shader paths. Shader Execution Reordering also moves out of preview. SER is the feature that can improve ray tracing efficiency by letting the GPU regroup similar ray work to run it more coherently. The practical change in this update is that apps can query whether the GPU actually performs reordering, not just whether the API is present.

© NVIDIA

Up next, SDK 1.719

The preview runtime, 1.719-preview, adds three things. Fence Barriers extend Enhanced Barriers by letting command buffers signal and wait on fences inside the stream, which can help with finer-grained synchronization. VPblit 3DLUT exposes a video-processing hardware path for tone mapping and LUT operations, which can move that work off the main 3D engine in some setups. Finally, the D3D12 Extensions mechanism is basically an official plug-in style way for hardware vendors to ship experimental features before they become part of core D3D12.

Hardware Support

Hardware support is split between “the API exists” and “the GPU actually accelerates it in hardware,” and Shader Execution Reordering is the clearest example: Microsoft lists Shader Model 6.9 features like Long Vector and the 16-bit float helper updates for AMD Radeon RX 9000 series, Intel Arc B-Series Graphics, and all NVIDIA RTX GPUs, while ray tracing support is more uneven, with Opacity Micromaps limited to RTX hardware (hardware accelerated on RTX 40 series and newer, software emulated on older RTX) and SER exposed on AMD RX 9000 series without actual reordering, but enabled with real reordering on Intel Arc B-Series and RTX 40 series and newer.

For the D3D12 “customer requested” features in Agility SDK 1.619, Microsoft lists AMD Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series, Intel Arc B-Series, and all RTX hardware, with some limits still depending on drivers. In the 1.719-preview runtime, Fence Barriers are listed for AMD RX 7000 and RX 9000 and Intel Arc B-Series, while NVIDIA points developers to vendor access, and VPblit 3DLUT support is called out for Intel Core Ultra Lunar Lake and Panther Lake with driver 32.0.101.8530 or newer, and for AMD on Radeon RX 7000 plus Ryzen AI 300 and 400 iGPU starting with the February 2026 Developer Preview driver (25.30), again with NVIDIA requiring vendor guidance.

Source: Microsoft

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