DXC 1.8.2405 Available Now, Including HLSL 202x

The HLSL team is excited to announce DXC 1.8.2405 which is a packed release! In addition to a healthy assortment of bug fixes and quality of life improvements, this release features two things we’re really excited about. First this is the first DXC release to contain Windows binaries built with Clang alongside the binaries built with MSVC, and it includes the first feature planned for the next HLSL language version, which is ready for user testing. We will dig into a lot more details later in this post, but two quick TL;DRs are:

• Using the Clang to build DXC binaries showed a modest performance improvement for compiling shaders. These binaries should work as drop-in replacements instead of the MSVC-built ones and might give you a cheap win to speed up compile times.
• To prepare your HLSL codebase for the new language features you can add these arguments to your shader compiler options -HV 202x -Wconversion -Wdouble-promotion -Whlsl-legacy-literal. These options will enable the new language behavior and emit warnings for type conversions which could indicate important changes in behavior or precision.

As with all HLSL language versions, once our new language version is feature complete, stabilized, and has a proper name, we will make this the default language version in DXC (it already is for Clang). We don’t have a timeline for that yet, but likely sometime in 2025 or 2026.

Note for our Xbox developers: the new language feature will be coming soon to a GDK near you, so keep reading.