Windows Vista & DirectX

November 23, 2005 @ 23:09 | In Programming | |

Windows Vista will be coming next year and with it a new GUI architecture based on DirectX. Although it is difficult to get info about the future DirectX (out of NDA) you can get an idea of what is coming here.

Here are the more interestings point:

GDI will be deprecated and software emulated
D3D9 will be available in Windows Vista. Lower versions won’t be supported (emulated?)
Forget all the tricks about performance in D3D (batching). Microsoft has decided to attack the problem at a low level: IHV will need to implement a new driver for D3D9Vista. In this model, calls to the API are not so costly (command buffer is moved to user mode). And forget the problems with DEVICE_LOST! It will only occurs under very strange circustances.
Memory for D3DPOOL_DEFAULT wil be virtualized and D3DPOOL_MANAGED is deprecated.
The fun will come with D3D10. The new pipeline stages Input Assembler and Geometry Shader will allow to do things unthinkable now.