Microsoft Previews Shader Model 6.10 with New DirectX GPU Features

It may be hard to believe, but this August will be eight years since the release of the original GeForce RTX GPUs. Over time, matrix math accelerators have come to consume more and more of our GPU dies, and not just NVIDIA's either; both AMD and Intel have dedicated AI accelerator hardware on their GPUs now. Despite all that, though, there still hasn't been a generalized API to access them; developers had to make use of vendor-specific hacks, which is why basically nobody bothered.

Well, with the upcoming release of DirectX Shader Model 6.10 alongside the new Agility SDK 1.720-preview, that all changes. The big feature this time around is the new "linalg::Matrix" API, which provides a method for developers to make use of the matrix math hardware present inside nearly every GPU nowadays regardless of which GPU vendor the user is running, directly inside ...