DirectX Raytracing Preview: How It Could Cut Memory 90%

Ray tracing has always been the gorgeous houseguest who eats everything in the fridge. Your GPU memory, specifically. Microsoft may have just found a way to shrink that appetite: on October 28, 2026 it previewed Clustered Geometry and Partitioned TLAS for DirectX Raytracing, calling the release the most significant DXR update since the tech's 2018 debut. In its most dramatic demo, memory for ray tracing structures dropped by about 90% and frame rates went from a slideshow to silky.

• The headline demo: a Radeon RX 9070 sample jumped from 1.2fps to 79fps, with acceleration-structure memory falling from 7,519MiB to 774MiB.
• New hardware? Not required beyond existing ray tracing support, says Microsoft, although GPU drivers still have to add it.
• Current support: all Nvidia RTX GPUs, AMD Radeon RX 9000 and Intel Arc B-series, with Qualcomm targeted for 2027.
• Availability: a developer preview in Agility SDK 1.722, so games have to adopt it before you see anything.

What Is DirectX Clustered Geometry?

Imagine re-sorting your entire game library every time you buy one new title. That is roughly the headache ray tracing has with detailed, moving worlds, because the GPU relies on big lookup structures to figure out what each ray hits, and rebuilding them is expensive.

Clustered Geometry chops objects into reusable bundles of up to 256 triangles and 256 vertices, so an engine can reuse work when streaming in detail or animating a character. Partitioned TLAS applies the same logic to the whole scene: if only one corner of the map changes, the engine updates that region and leaves the rest alone. Developers can use either feature or both.

Microsoft also points to a very cool side effect. Cheaper builds can make it practical to ray trace the same full-detail geometry used for normal rendering, so shadows and reflections finally match what you see on screen instead of a low-poly stand-in.

Will Ray Tracing Really Use 90% Less Memory in Games?

Time for the boss-fight-sized caveat. That 90% figure comes from a deliberately punishing Microsoft sample rather than a shipping game. As MIXED points out, the sample gives every animated object its own structure, which real games can often avoid, so a retail title could see a very different gain.

The 774MiB number also covers acceleration structures only, not your total VRAM. And temporary scratch memory actually grew in this test, from 8.25MiB to 179MiB for animated objects and from 1.83MiB to 526MiB for static ones. PC Gamer flags that as a real logistics puzzle for developers. Still, even a fraction of that saving would be a lovely gift while memory prices are doing their best final boss impression.

Which GPUs Support the DirectX Raytracing Preview?

Right now the list looks like this, per MIXED's rundown of the vendor drivers:

• Nvidia: all RTX GPUs with Game Ready driver 621.01.
• AMD: Radeon RX 9000 series with a developer preview driver.
• Intel: Arc B-series plus Core Ultra 200V and Series 3 processors with a beta driver.
• Qualcomm: Snapdragon X2 driver support targeted for the first half of 2027.

Microsoft says support for some older ray tracing GPUs is still to be determined, since performance and validation may rule them out. So don't assume your older card gets invited to the party just yet.

What Does This Mean for PC Gamers?

Short term? Nothing you can download tonight. This is a tool for engine developers, and it does not automatically speed up your existing library. If you want a preview of the idea in action, Gears of War: E-Day already uses a similar approach through Nvidia's own RTX Mega Geometry.

The long-term win is standardization. Moving this kind of tech into DirectX gives studios one common route across supporting GPUs instead of a vendor-specific one, and that is how nerdy graphics breakthroughs turn into features in everybody's games. We have seen how clever rendering tricks can stretch older hardware before, like foveated rendering in Half-Life: Alyx. More worlds that look incredible without demanding a new GPU? Sign me up. Keep up with the rest of our gaming coverage for the first titles to adopt it.

Sources: Microsoft DirectX Developer Blog — October 28, 2026; MIXED — October 29, 2026; Jon Peddie Research — October 29, 2026; PC Gamer — November 2, 2026.