Shader reordering execution on the RTX 4090

Hello, I’ve heard that Shader Execution Reordering hasn’t been enabled on the majority of titles that support ray tracing. (In fact I believe that it is only enabled on a few at the moment…) What is the technical reason stopping shader execution reordering from working by default on all games that support RTX?

Hello @stephen_martin and welcome to the NVIDIA developer forums!

Did you see the excellent Technical Blog on the feature? It explains in detail, together with the linked whitepaper, how it works and what the benefits are.

And after looking into the details I am certain it becomes clear that this feature is not only on the Hardware and driver side but involves some additional work by the individual game developers.

I hope this answers your question!

Hi @MarkusHoHo! I just had a brief look over the article. Quick question, is SER only DXR API specific? I mean, if someone using OpenGL or NVIDIA OptiX, will it still work?

SER is not DirextX specific. It is rather an extension of NVAPI and as such has only Windows as a requirement.

Markus, is there a chance this improvement will ever show up as a Vulkan extension? Even an NV-specific one?

I’m using Vulkan Ray tracing and HLSL → DXC → SPV pipeline, if that matters.

I honestly don’t know. Usually NVIDIA does like to include nice features like this to different APIs, but SER is still so fresh, hard to say if or when we get around putting it to other APIs.

Hi Markus, do you know who one would reach out to do see about gaining access to DLSS Frame Generation and MicroMesh SDK?

I applied six months ago and still can’t use these features I paid good money for on my RTX 4090, despite having private SDK access to virtually every other SDK NVidia has already. Can you help me out? It would really be appreciated.

I am afraid you need to be a bit more patient, but general Frame Generation access will come soon.

I recommend checking out the GTC Keynote in a bit over two weeks, and specifically attend “How to Build a Real-time Path Tracer”, to learn more about it. Compressed Micro-Meshes also have their own session by the way.