While I go 'oo' at every perfectly lit videogame vista, ray tracing can sometimes make my gaming rig go 'HNNNG'. I love a traced ray as much as the next person, but realistic reflections and lighting can be a bit of a memory hog. Thankfully, Microsoft is previewing something new for DirectX that could significantly take the load off many ageing rigs.

It's a pair of features called 'Clustered Geometry' and 'Partitioned TLAS'. At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think of this DirectX update as bringing tech very similar to Nvidia RTX Mega Geometry to every other GPU vendor.

Obviously there's more to it than that, though, with Microsoft describing this as the "most significant update [to DXR] since its debut in 2018." Top line: Microsoft's own testing of this update suggests it could reduce ray tracing memory load by as much as 90% without the need for a team green GPU (via Techspot).

So, how does it work? Well, without this update, ray tracing is already beaming between less detailed versions of the geometry you see in-game. Traditional ray tracing tech does this because bouncing around detailed models afresh for every frame would simply take too long.

Clustered geometry slices up the detailed models into neat little packages of 256 triangles or fewer. Partitioned TLAS then does a similar thing for the entire videogame vista, splitting a scene into smaller regions. Why? Well, rather than searching the entire map every time, looking for what's changed and updating the frame accordingly, the ol' dread pirate Ray Tracing needs only to run their finger over the quadrants they know are different, marking the spot with 'X'—or something like that, the metaphor got away from me a bit in the middle there.

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