Windows 10: Microsoft Extending the Reach of Windows ML and DirectML

Brink · Mar 18, 2020

Since the initial release, Windows ML has powered numerous Machine Learning (ML) experiences on Windows. Delivering reliable, high-performance results across the breadth of Windows hardware, Windows ML is designed to make ML deployment easier, allowing developers to focus on creating innovative applications.

Windows ML is built upon ONNX Runtime to provide a simple, model-based, WinRT API optimized for Windows developers. This API enables you to take your ONNX model and seamlessly integrate it into your application to power ML experiences. Layered below the ONNX Runtime is the DirectML API for cross-vendor hardware acceleration. DirectML is part of the DirectX family and provides full control for real-time, performance-critical scenarios.

This end-to-end stack provides developers with the ability to run inferences on any Windows device, regardless of the machineâs hardware configuration, all from a single and compatible codebase.

Figure 1 â The Windows AI Platform stack

Windows ML is used in a variety of real-world application scenarios. The Windows Photos app uses it to help organize your photo collection for an easier and richer browsing experience. The Windows Ink stack uses Windows ML to analyze your handwriting, converting ink strokes into text, shapes, lists and more. Adobe Premier Pro offers a feature that will take your video and crop it to the aspect ratio of your choice, all while preserving the important action in each frame.

With the next release of Windows 10, we are continuing to build on this momentum and are further expanding to support more exciting and unique experiences. The interest and engagement from the community provided valuable feedback that allowed us to focus on what our customers need most. Today, we are pleased to share with you some of that important feedback and how we are continually working to build from it.

Bringing Windows ML and Direct ML ton More Places

Today, Windows ML is fully supported as a built-in Windows component on Windows 10 version 1809 (October 2018 Update) and newer. Developers can use the corresponding Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) and immediately begin leveraging Windows ML in their application. For developers that want to continue using this built-in version, we will continue to update and innovate Windows ML and provide you with the feature set and performance you need with each new Windows release.

A common piece of feedback weâve heard is that developers today want the ability to ship products and applications that have feature parity to all of their customers. In other words, developers want to leverage Windows ML on applications targeting older versions of Windows and not just the most recent. To support this, we are going to make Windows ML available as a stand-alone package that can be shipped with your application. This redistributable path enables Windows ML support for CPU inference on Windows versions 8.1 and newer, and GPU hardware-acceleration on Windows 10 1709 and newer.

Going forward, with each new update of Windows ML, there will be a corresponding redist package, with matching new features and optimizations, available on GitHub. Developers will find that with either option they choose, they will receive an official Windows offering that is extensively tested, guaranteeing reliability and high performance.

Windows ML, ONNX Runtime, and Direct ML

In addition to bringing Windows ML support to more versions of Windows, we are also unifying our approach with Windows ML, ONNX Runtime, and DirectML. At the core of this stack, ONNX Runtime is designed to be a cross-platform inference engine. With Windows ML and DirectML, we build around this runtime to offer a rich set of features and hardware scaling, designed for Windows and the diverse hardware ecosystem.

We understand the complexities developers face in building applications that offer a great customer experience, while also reaching their wide customer base. In order to provide developers with the right flexibility, we are bringing the Windows ML API and a DirectML execution provider to the ONNX Runtime GitHub project. Developers can now choose the API set that works best for their application scenarios and still benefit from DirectMLâs high-performance and consistent hardware acceleration across the breadth of devices supported in the Windows ecosystem.

In GitHub today, the Windows ML and DirectML preview is available as source, with instructions and samples on how to build it, as well as a prebuilt NuGet package for CPU deployments.
Are you a Windows app developer that needs a friendly WinRT API that will integrate easily with your other application code and is optimized for Windows devices? Windows ML is a perfect choice for that. Do you need to build an application with a single code-path that can work across other non-Windows devices? The ONNX Runtime cross-platform C API can provide that.

Figure 2 â newly layered Windows AI and ONNX Runtime

Developers already using the ONNX Runtime C-API and who want to check out the DirectML EP (Preview) can follow these steps.

Experience it for yourself

We are already making great progress on these new features.

You can get access to the preview of Windows ML and Direct ML for the ONNX Runtime here. We invite you to join us on GitHub and provide feedback at [email protected]

The official Windows ML redistributable package will be available on NuGet in May 2020.

As always, we greatly appreciate all the support from the developer community. Weâll continue to share updates as we make more progress with these upcoming features.
Click to expand...

Source: Extending the Reach of Windows ML and DirectML - Windows Developer Blog

:)

Brink · Mar 18, 2020

DirectML at GDC 2019

Introduction

Last year at GDC, we shared our excitement about the many possibilities for using machine learning in game development. If you’re unfamiliar with machine learning or neural networks, I strongly encourage you to check out our blog post from last year, which is a primer for many of the topics discussed in this post.

This year, we’re furthering our commitment to enable ML in games by making DirectML publicly available for the first time. We continuously engage with our customers and heard the need for a GPU-inferencing API that gives developers more control over their workloads to make integration with rendering engines easier. With DirectML, game developers write code once and their ML scenario works on all DX12-capable GPUs – a hardware agnostic solution at the operator level. We provide the consistency and performance required to integrate innovations in ML into rendering engines.

Additionally, Unity announced plans to support DirectML in their Unity Inference Engine that powers Unity ML Agents. Their decision to adopt DirectML was driven by the available hardware acceleration on Windows platforms while maintaining control of the data locality and the execution flow. By utilizing the regular graphics pipeline, they are saving on GPU stalls and have full integration with the rendering engine. Unity is in the process of integrating DirectML into their inference engine to allow developers to take advantage of metacommands and other optimizations available with DirectML.

We are very excited about our collaboration with Unity and the promise this brings to the industry. Providing developers fast inferencing across a broad set of platforms democratizes machine learning in games and improves the industry by proving out that ML can be integrated well with rendering work to enable novel experiences for gamers. With DirectML, we want to ensure that applications run well across all Windows hardware and empower developers to confidently ship machine learning models on lightweight laptops and hardcore gaming rigs alike. From a single model to a custom inference engine, DirectML will give you the most out of your hardware.

Why DirectML

Many new real-time inferencing scenarios have been introduced to the developer community over the last few years through cutting edge machine learning research. Some examples of these are super resolution, denoising, style transfer, game testing, and tools for animation and art. These models are computationally expensive but in many cases are required to run in real-time. DirectML enables these to run with high-performance by providing a wide set of optimized operators without the overhead of traditional inferencing engines.

To further enhance performance on the operators that customers need most, we work directly with hardware vendors, like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, to directly to provide architecture-specific optimizations, called metacommands. Newer hardware provides advances in ML performance through the use of FP16 precision and designated ML space on chips. DirectML’s metacommands provide vendors a way of exposing those advantages through their drivers to a common interface. Developers save the effort of hand tuning for individual hardware but get the benefits of these innovations.

DirectML is already providing some of these performance advantages by being the underlying foundation of WinML, our high-level inferencing engine that powers applications outside of gaming, like Adobe, Photos, Office, and Intelligent Ink. The API flexes its muscles by enabling applications to run on millions of Windows devices today.

Getting Started

DirectML is available today in the Windows Insider Preview and will be available more broadly in our next release of Windows. To help developers learn this exciting new technology, we provided a few resources below, including samples that show developers how to use DirectML in real-time scenarios and exhibit our recommended best practices.

Documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/direct3d12/dml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">

Samples: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectML-Samples" target="_blank" rel="noopener">

If you were unable to attend our GDC talk this year, slides containing more in-depth information about the API and best practices will be available here in the coming days. We will be releasing the super-resolution demo featured in this deck as an open source sample, coming soon. Stay tuned to the GitHub account above.

Click to expand...

Source: DirectML at GDC 2019 | DirectX Developer Blog

Brink · Mar 18, 2020

DirectML at GDC 2019

Introduction

Last year at GDC, we shared our excitement about the many possibilities for using machine learning in game development. If you’re unfamiliar with machine learning or neural networks, I strongly encourage you to check out our blog post from last year, which is a primer for many of the topics discussed in this post.

This year, we’re furthering our commitment to enable ML in games by making DirectML publicly available for the first time. We continuously engage with our customers and heard the need for a GPU-inferencing API that gives developers more control over their workloads to make integration with rendering engines easier. With DirectML, game developers write code once and their ML scenario works on all DX12-capable GPUs – a hardware agnostic solution at the operator level. We provide the consistency and performance required to integrate innovations in ML into rendering engines.

Additionally, Unity announced plans to support DirectML in their Unity Inference Engine that powers Unity ML Agents. Their decision to adopt DirectML was driven by the available hardware acceleration on Windows platforms while maintaining control of the data locality and the execution flow. By utilizing the regular graphics pipeline, they are saving on GPU stalls and have full integration with the rendering engine. Unity is in the process of integrating DirectML into their inference engine to allow developers to take advantage of metacommands and other optimizations available with DirectML.

We are very excited about our collaboration with Unity and the promise this brings to the industry. Providing developers fast inferencing across a broad set of platforms democratizes machine learning in games and improves the industry by proving out that ML can be integrated well with rendering work to enable novel experiences for gamers. With DirectML, we want to ensure that applications run well across all Windows hardware and empower developers to confidently ship machine learning models on lightweight laptops and hardcore gaming rigs alike. From a single model to a custom inference engine, DirectML will give you the most out of your hardware.

Why DirectML

Many new real-time inferencing scenarios have been introduced to the developer community over the last few years through cutting edge machine learning research. Some examples of these are super resolution, denoising, style transfer, game testing, and tools for animation and art. These models are computationally expensive but in many cases are required to run in real-time. DirectML enables these to run with high-performance by providing a wide set of optimized operators without the overhead of traditional inferencing engines.

To further enhance performance on the operators that customers need most, we work directly with hardware vendors, like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, to directly to provide architecture-specific optimizations, called metacommands. Newer hardware provides advances in ML performance through the use of FP16 precision and designated ML space on chips. DirectML’s metacommands provide vendors a way of exposing those advantages through their drivers to a common interface. Developers save the effort of hand tuning for individual hardware but get the benefits of these innovations.

DirectML is already providing some of these performance advantages by being the underlying foundation of WinML, our high-level inferencing engine that powers applications outside of gaming, like Adobe, Photos, Office, and Intelligent Ink. The API flexes its muscles by enabling applications to run on millions of Windows devices today.

Getting Started

DirectML is available today in the Windows Insider Preview and will be available more broadly in our next release of Windows. To help developers learn this exciting new technology, we provided a few resources below, including samples that show developers how to use DirectML in real-time scenarios and exhibit our recommended best practices.

Documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/direct3d12/dml" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">

Samples: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectML-Samples" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">

If you were unable to attend our GDC talk this year, slides containing more in-depth information about the API and best practices will be available here in the coming days. We will be releasing the super-resolution demo featured in this deck as an open source sample, coming soon. Stay tuned to the GitHub account above.

Click to expand...

Source: DirectML at GDC 2019 | DirectX Developer Blog

Billion Debbarma · Mar 18, 2020

windows10 and Samsung Ml-1610 Printer

Hi Keith,

Welcome to Microsoft Community and thank you for posting your query.

Let me assist you with your query.

The printer may not be compatible Windows 10, since the printer driver is not available for Windows 10. However, I suggest you to go to the below link, download the latest updated printer and install it in compatibility mode and check if that helps.

Business Printers for Small, Medium & Enterprise Businesses | HP® Official Site

Right-click on the setup file of the driver and select Properties.

Select Compatibility tab.

Check Run this program in Compatibility mode.

Let the driver install and then check the functionality.

Hope this helps. If you need further assistance with Windows, let us know and will be glad to help.

Windows 10: Microsoft Extending the Reach of Windows ML and DirectML

Microsoft Extending the Reach of Windows ML and DirectML

Microsoft Extending the Reach of Windows ML and DirectML

Microsoft Extending the Reach of Windows ML and DirectML

Microsoft Extending the Reach of Windows ML and DirectML - Similar Threads - Microsoft Extending Reach

Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml found in C:\$Extend\$Deleted

Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml found in C:\$Extend\$Deleted

Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.H!ml

Backdoor:Win32/Bladabindi!ml

Wacatac.A!ml and Wacatac.B!ml keep getting detected by Microsoft Defender Antivirus

Trojan:Script/Foretype.A!ml

Program:Win32/Uwasson.A!ml

DirectML at GDC 2019

Extend your reach with offline licensing in Windows Store for Business