Microsoft's update for Direct3D, with opacity micromaps and shader execution reordering now official features, will probably mean little to gamers but graphics devs are going to be happy

A screenshot from Alan Wake 2 showing the main character walking down a street.

When it comes to games on PCs, there's one thing that thousands of them have in common: the graphics API used to tell the GPU what to do. Specifically, I'm talking about Microsoft's Direct3D and I'm telling you about this because D3D12, for short, has now been updated with a new shader model and a bunch of other additions that will probably mean little to gamers but will keep devs happy for sure.

You can read more about the specific details in a short blog by Microsoft, but be warned, it's not exactly lightweight reading for the casual PC enthusiast. Starting with the new Shader Model 6.9, the most notable additions are HLSL (high level shader language) commands for two DXR (DirectX Raytracing) 1.2 features: opacity micromaps (though this has been in D3D12 for a while now) and shader execution reordering.