DirectX SDK - December 2005

December 14, 2005 @ 2:22 | In Programming | |

A new bimonthly release of DirectX SDK is available for download. Apart from some bugfixes, little D3DX API improvements, some new technical articles (you are using minidumps aren’t you? Soonly I’ll describe how good can be for you and your team a good infrastructure for debugging and error reporting using Debugging Tools and an internal SymbolServer) and a new iteration of the nice PIX there is something new in this release: a Direct3D 10 Technology Preview!

You can play with this new toy only in Windows Vista (currently in beta) and as there is not currently hardware supporting all the new features you will have to use a reference rasterizer provided by Microsoft.

I have no run the examples, but reading the documentation I get some good impresions:

Caps are dead. If you have a card supporting D3D10 it will support all the capabilities! This move (not without its controversy) is a good move to me. We lost hardware specific capabilities, but I think that this will be a positive decission in an open platform like Pc
As previously noted, batches will be a lot more faster than now. How much? We will have to wait for the real hardware.

Remember that D3D10 will not deprecate D3D9 in WindowsVista. Both will be used.