MicrosoftAnnounceThe core technology of the enhanced DXR 1.2 (DirectX Raytracing 1.2) standard, which was previously promoted in collaboration with several major hardware manufacturers, – Shader Execution Reordering (SER) – has been fully incorporated into the latest Shader Model 6.9 specification. This means that through the opening up of the underlying API, Intel Arc B series graphics cards will be able to achieve an astonishing 90% improvement in real-time ray tracing performance, and even the NVIDIA RTX 4090 can extract an additional 40% performance boost.
The standardization of this technology not only saves players money on hardware upgrades, but also heralds a new stage where ray tracing technology will gradually move from being a "performance monster" to being "universally accessible".
Ending the chaos of ray tracing calculations: What exactly is the magic of SER?
To understand why SER can bring such a huge performance improvement, we must first understand the "physical dilemma" that traditional ray tracing faces in GPU computing.
In the real world, the reflection and refraction of light are completely random. When a game engine shoots out a ray of light, it might hit metal, water, glass, or rough rock. In the traditional DXR rendering pipeline, because the light hits objects of different materials, the GPU must call completely different "shaders" to process it.
This leads to a serious problem: idle threads and waiting processes. Because the architecture of GPUs is designed to handle a large number of highly consistent computational tasks, when different lighting brings back drastically different rendering computational requirements, threads must wait for each other to complete their tasks, resulting in serious waste of resources (unless the GPU's computing power is sufficient).
Microsoft included the SER feature in Shader Model 6.9 to address these issues. SER allows applications to perform "task inventory" within the GPU by importing HISL source code. By storing all object data from a ray strike in a single block and then reordering the processing based on "spatial location" and "shader similarity," the GPU's computing resources can be utilized more efficiently.
Painless upgrade: Enjoy the benefits of a simple driver update.
The biggest advantage of including SER in Microsoft's official API standard is that it can directly unlock the hardware potential of various graphics cards without the need for additional software or adjustments.
According to data released by Microsoft, with the support of this technology, the real-time ray tracing rendering performance of Intel Arc B series (Battlemage) graphics cards has increased by up to an astonishing 90%, while the NVIDIA RTX 4090, which already has sufficient real-time ray tracing computing performance, has seen an additional 40% performance boost.
For the average consumer, no complicated settings are required to achieve real-time ray tracing performance improvements. With Microsoft incorporating SER into the Shader Model 6.9 specification, which belongs to Agility SDK 1.619, gamers will be able to enjoy a significant performance boost in games that support this technology simply by updating their AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA graphics card drivers.
