DirectX 12 Agility SDK Announced and Released Today by Microsoft Apr 20, 2021 12:56 EDT During today's GameStack Live event, Microsoft announced the brand new DirectX 12 Agility SDK, already available to developers for use in their games. The main purpose of DirectX 12 Agility is to broaden the access to DX12 features that were previously gated to the latest Windows 10 OS updates. This made adoption of the latest and greatest features slower as game developers inevitably waited for a 'critical mass' of users to updated to the latest Windows 10 OS version, which notoriously can take a while. With DirectX 12 Agility, this issue effectively goes away as the minimum requirement has been lowered to that of the Windows 10 November 2019 Update. As long as a PC has that installed, it'll be able to take advantage of all of the DX12 Ultimate features (ray tracing, sampler feedback, mesh shading, variable rate shading), as well as the newly released Shader Model 6.6 which comes with features like 64-bit integer atomic operations, dynamic resources (bindless), helper lane detection, compute shader derivatives, 8-bit packing operations, and wave size.