This page contains descriptions and links to the latest versions of all the components that the DirectX team at Microsoft has built or are actively working on.
DirectX Runtimes and SDKs
Component
Description
Link
DirectX 12 Agility SDK
SDKs with support for the latest DirectX 12 features that run on Windows 10 Version 1909 (Windows 10 November 2019 Update) and up
DirectX 12 Agility SDK Landing Page Note that the DirectX team will keep on shipping DirectX 12 updates with Windows 10; the Agility SDK is intended for developers looking to bring our latest features to a large install base
D3D12on7
Windows 7-compatible DirectX 12 runtime with support for the RS5 (Windows 10 October 2018 Update) feature set
DirectStorage is a feature intended to allow games to make full use of high-speed storage (such as NVMe SSDs) that can can deliver multiple gigabytes a second of small (eg 64kb) data reads with minimal CPU overhead
Microsoft.DXSDK.D3DX provides the legacy D3DX9, D3DX10, and D3DX11 utility libraries for maintaining older codebases and includes side-by-side redistributable binariesMicrosoft.XAudio2.Redist provides XAudio 2.9 for Windows 7 SP1 or later with side-by-side redistributable binaries
Compiler and related tools used to compile High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) programs into DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) representation
DirectXShaderCompiler repo Note that the Windows 10 SDK already comes with a version of the Shader Compiler. Downloading the latest Shader Compiler is recommended for developers looking for the newest HLSL features
PIX on Windows
Microsoft’s DirectX debugging and profiling tool, allowing devs to find issues and do performance tuning
High-performance, hardware-accelerated DirectX 12 library for machine learning, providing GPU acceleration for common machine learning tasks across a broad range of supported hardware and drivers
Library to help apps kickstart their MultiGPU implementation. Called the affinity layer because execution and resources can be ‘affinitized’ to one or more GPUs in the system
Engineering specs for several DirectX features. This supplements the Official DirectX Documentation above with an extra level of detail that can be useful to expert developers.
Maps graphics commands from D3D11 to D3D12. Note that D3D11On12 is not an implementation of the D3D11 API, but is instead an implementation of the D3D11 usermode DDI (device driver interface).