Microsoft boosts ray tracing performance with DXR 1.2

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2 has arrived to make ray tracing faster in future games

At GDC 2025, Microsoft launched DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2, an update that promises “groundbreaking” performance improvements in PC games with ray tracing. This update was made in partnership with GPU makers Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm and game studios like Remedy.

The main changes that DXR 1.2 delivers are support for opacity micromaps (OMM) and shader execution reordering (SER). These features are designed to deliver higher levels of ray tracing performance in games.

With Opacity Micromaps, Microsoft claims that game performance can be boosted by up to 2.3x in path-traced games. With Shader Execution Reordering, rendering performance can increase by up to 2x in some scenarios. These changes should make future games faster on supported graphics hardware.

Nvidia has committed to supporting both of these features on its RTX GPUs with future driver updates. Intel has also claimed that they will support SER when it is available as part of a future Agility SDK release. However, Intel has also stated that OMM support will become available with “future hardware”. Qualcomm has also claimed that both SER and OMM will be supported in its next-generation integrated GPUs.

Note that AMD made no statement regarding OMM and SER support as part of Microsoft’s DXR 1.2 reveal. If AMD didn’t make a statement, does that mean that its current-gen (RDNA 4) GPUs lack DirectX Raytracing 1.2 support?

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