Powering Real-Time Messaging at Scale with Azure Cosmos DB


Microsoft Teams, Copilot, Azure Communication Services and many other product offerings from Microsoft, rely on a unified messaging platform that powers real-time communication and collaboration at an unprecedented scale. This messaging platform has become critical for enabling boundary-less collaboration, supporting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. To ensure global discovery, durable storage and performance needed […]

D3D12 Opacity Micromaps


DirectX Raytracing (DXR) now supports Opacity Micromaps (OMMs), enabling hardware to handle alpha tested geometry more efficiently than relying only on costly AnyHit shader invocations. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including OMMs, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The Union YouTube Recording. In the video, Remedy showed […]

D3D12 Shader Execution Reordering


Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is an addition to DirectX Raytracing that enables application shader code inform hardware how to find coherency across rays so they can be sorted to execute better in parallel. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including SER, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC DirectX State Of The […]

Agility SDK 1.717-preview and 1.616-retail


We are pleased to announce both a retail and preview Agility SDK release with several new features, available on Agility SDK Downloads today! As usual, the features in this release come with Day One PIX support. Please read the PIX blog post for more information. Agility SDK 1.717-preview features Cooperative Vectors unlocks powerful new hardware acceleration for vector […]