

In that same area, SampleCmpLevel() has also been added to allow you to explicitly specific the MIP level you want to sample and compare to, filling an obvious gap in overall sampling functionality where you could only explicitly choose the zero level before. Shader Model 6.7 also allows you to provide variable sample location offsets to the Load() function and Sample() function family in your shader, removing the compile time restriction that was in place previously, making using sample location offsets lot more useful in practice. There are also some associated changes to resource management that are also part of this raw gather feature to allow it to work, mostly to tell D3D12 that your texture resource can be cast to the type you need, before you call GatherRaw() in your shader. The texture hardware programming changes are focused on making texture gather - a feature where you ask the hardware to give you the four samples needed for a filtering operation to take place - more ergonomic, mainly by relaxing some usability restrictions and allowing access to the raw samples without them being processed on the way back to the shader. Shader Model 6.7 advanced texture operationsīack in February this year, Microsoft announced that Shader Model 6.7 was in the works, aiming the guts of work put into that new shader model at more flexible and free use of the texture hardware in modern GPUs, along with another useful increase to the wave-level programming model. The KB driver supports the Enhanced Barriers preview on all currently supported AMD GPUs. If you want to know more, keep reading, and we’ll update this post with the link to the AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver release as soon as it is available.

In order to support that, we have an upcoming AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition release with full SM6.7 support on all currently supported AMD Radeon GPUs, and a KB driver to use with the preview Agility SDK to try out Enhanced Barriers.

In addition, a new preview Agility SDK (1.706.n) is also available that includes a new Enhanced Barriers preview. If you just want the good news and links: Microsoft have released a new Agility SDK (1.606.n) that contains support for Shader Model 6.7 (SM6.7).
