Eddy Luten

Is typing

Archive

Common Tags

XNA AI MkDocs id Update Programming NVIDIA Windows Visual Basic Whatever AJAX WebGL JavaScript Visual Studio OpenGL C-Sharp DirectX Intel Linux idTech Apple .NET Win32 Zune Microsoft AMD MSDN TTRPG C Games Google Books Netherlands Tutorial

2 minute read

As a developer (and gamer) you always want the latest gadgets and DirectX 10 seems to be one of these gadgets that you just “need to have”.

But does it justify spending much money for an upgrade?

What does DirectX 10 have that DirectX 9 doesn’t? According to some technology demos - not so much. Ok, some special effects but what about the rest? A game isn’t made out of SFX (although it seems to become a trend).

It turns out that DirectX 10 isn’t only about special effects but defines a new style of next generation technology. Video Card manufacturers are forced to use optimized pathways to support the new industry standard resulting in very fast hardware such as the Geforce 8 series (8800 GTX, 8800 GTS).

One of these features is WDDM which stands for Windows Display Driver Model. WDDM is basically a resource manager for graphics processes. One example of what WDDM does is this: In XP when you switch from one Direct3D application you will receive a DEVICE_LOST exception, which basically means that you can’t run two processes from one GPU. Your application crashes and you’ll have to write X amount of handlers dealing with the exception. According to Microsoft this is now a thing of the past.

Since the Vista desktop is a 3D environment you’d loose your application everytime you minimize. This has now been eliminated. Each GPU process is its own thread (just like in regular programming) meaning that you can have X amount of 3D processes running without the need for special handlers. Also in the same category is improved crash handling that comes with DirectX 10.

Ok, so that’s neat but I’ll need more to be convinced to switch to DirectX 10 hardware and Windows Vista.

Another feature of WDDM is that if you run out of video memory WDDM can virtualize your System’s memory for video processes. Which - in theory - sounds very cool, but I don’t know if this would cause slowdowns.

Here’s a list of new features

  • Shader Model 4
  • Texture arrays
  • DirectSound is gone, XACT is its replacement
  • Less load on the CPU - GPU tasks really get processed by the GPU this time
  • Unified Pipeline Architecture - the Programmable Graphics pipeline (SM 4.0)
  • No object limit - There is no software limit to how many objects you can add to your scene. The only factor in this is your graphics hardware
  • Geometry Shaders
  • Instancing 2.0 - An optimized version of the Instancing technology found in Geforce 6 series up and Radeon 9500 and up

So as a developer is it worth it to upgrade to Vista and DirectX 10 hardware? In my opinion, yes. This is simply the new generation of computer graphics, just because you have to upgrade doesn’t mean is’t evil.

Remember when you upgraded from your TNT 2 card to a Geforce? Same thing. Yet this time the improvements revolve more around the pipeline than the actual quality of the image.

You may also enjoy

How I Track Tasks and Take Notes

4 minute read

A bunch of notebooks

I’ve been keeping track of my notes and daily tasks using a single method for over a decade, and it works pretty well for me. Someone close to me asked me how I keep track of everything without losing track, so I figured I’d outline it here. The system is easy to use and relatively loose but with enough structure to be consistent.

Read 849 more words...

Foundry VTT on DigitalOcean with SSL and PM2

9 minute read

Foundry Virtual Tabletop Screenshot

I absolutely LOVE Foundry Virtual Tabletop (FoundryVTT). It is by far the best $50 I’ve spent on my tabletop role-playing hobby in years. I can gush about the software on and on, and perhaps I will in a future post. This post, however, focuses on something a bit more practical.

For years, I’ve hosted my instance on AWS, but with the change to their public IP address pricing, it doesn’t make sense to stay with them since DigitalOcean offers a beefier solution at a lower monthly cost.

Read 1,765 more words...

Creating and Publishing a Bluesky Feed

9 minute read

Bluesky terminal feed output

I was recently invited to join Bluesky, a new social media platform. This was mostly motivated by the nightmare that Twitter has become over the past year or so. One of Bluesky’s nice features is the encouragement from the official team to build supplementary software. One way to do it is to build a custom feed. So, I set out to do just that: I built a feed that serves all posts related to TTRPGs on Bluesky. Here’s how I went about publishing mine on a DigitalOcean droplet using PM2, Nginx, and Let’s Encrypt.

Read 1,768 more words...