Microsoft Direct3D 10.1 Presentations at Siggraph 2007

September 21, 2007 less than 1 minute read

Below follows a link to all of Microsoft’s Siggraph 2007 presentations in one ZIP file.

Microsoft Direct3D 10.1 Presentations at Siggraph 2007

Way Off Topic: Internet Taxes, November 1st 2007

September 20, 2007 less than 1 minute read

If you’re an American citizen or resident and you’re not aware of this issue, keep reading. Otherwise, take action. Links follow.

The Internet is the “Information Highway.” It provides unlimited information, a myriad of free resources and some commercial resources. Due to an expiration of the “Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998” we might be hitting some toll-plazas along our routes. If you do not feel comfortable paying taxes for free information, sign up at DontTaxOurWeb.org to take some action. If you want to do more, write your senator, but do it promptly. We’re almost at November 1st.

This could potentially be doomsday for many of us. The main thing that the tax would cause is a limit on information which would hurt everyone. Since a large percentage of Americans use the internet, it is imperative that we keep an international resource out of local hands.

At this moment there are many opposed to internet taxes in the senate but it will not hurt to petition and write your congressman or congresswoman. This needs to be fought, freedom of information is at stake.

id Software: bye OpenGL, bye Linux

September 19, 2007 1 minute read

John Carmack and the id Software company have always been great supporters of the OpenGL Graphics API. Alas, major development with the API stops here for the game developer.

id Software has been working on a new game engine that would “revolutionize” the gaming industry and provide many advanced features. One of its main features is that it can support a constant 60fps on console systems. It was also announced that their new engine will run on: PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Eh, are we missing something important here?

Linux. Linux has always been a supported system when it came down to games from id Software. Yet according to Todd Hollenshead (id Software), id’s upcoming game “Rage” (which will be using idTech5) will be primarily a DirectX 9 game, not DirectX 10, nor OpenGL. Yet OpenGL will be used for the Mac release of both the engine and the game.

This could mean that OpenGL might become very unattractive in the game development community since there will be one less patron to support its Open cause.

One benefit from all this is that the game will be able to run on the Windows XP platform and not solely on Vista as all DirectX 10 games require. This, of course, is no consolidation for the Linux people who will now have to run the game on Windows.

XNA Game Studio 2.0 Announced

August 13, 2007 less than 1 minute read

Finally Microsoft has announced the second version of their XNA Game Studio. The best thing? It will work with all versions of Visual Studio 2005. Finally. Read the full story here.

DirectX 10: Is it worth upgrading to Vista for?

August 6, 2007 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.