Is Direct3D 10 on Windows XP Possible?

2008-03-25 3 minute read

There has been a firestorm of discussions on the topic of “Is Direct3D 10 on Windows XP Possible?” This article will attempt to provide an answer to this hot topic. The answer has already been provided by Microsoft’s officials on several occasions but regardless of the manner in which DirectX 10 functions in Vista, would the functionality provided in Direct3D 10 be possible to implement? The official answer is a resounding no for the entire DirectX API, but what about Direct3D 10 which would be the only API of interest here?

What’s the argument?

Like any Direct3D version, Direct3D 10 is an API which abstracts a pre-defined set of functionality (as much as the API supports) of the underlying hardware. Ever since Direct3D 10 came out however, the minimum hardware capabilities were defined by the API rather than the hardware. This was a way to eliminate the old DEVCAPS (Device Capabilities) struct found in Direct3D 9 and below and to push a certain level of standardization or conformance.

If we take a close look at the features presented in Direct3D 10, which is easy since it’s predefined (non-expandable), we’ll notice shortly that none of the features are limited to Vista; neither are they unique to Direct3D in general:

• Unified Architecture (programmable pipelines)
• Shader Model 4: HLSL Pixel Shader v4.0, Vertex Shader v4.0
• Geometry Shaders
• Texture Arrays
• Predicated Rendering
• Instancing 2.0, which is a redo of the previous Microsoft Geometry Instancing

When a notice is made that these features were already available under Windows XP through OpenGL 2 and up, attention will most likely be redirected towards the WDDM, which is the Windows Display Driver Model, unique to Windows Vista.

What’s WDDM?

WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) is a Windows Vista-only Windows Driver Model for IHVs (Independent Hardware Vendors) to base their display drivers on. WDDM allows the developers to take advantage of several new functions not available in the old XPDM Windows XP Display Driver Model, namely:

• Virtualized Video Memory:
  • Allows the Operating system to (optionally) utilize system RAM if the Video RAM (VRAM) is insufficient.
  • Application requires a to push some data to VRAM via D3D API calls:
  • D3D10 User-Mode abstract layer handles event and triggers:
  • The Kernel-Mode WDDM interface determines:
    • If VRAM is not full, push onto VRAM stack, else:
    • Push onto RAM stack.
  • If the application needs to pop the memory from the stack, it doesn’t have to determine where to pop it from since WDDM handles this process. The stack push/pop terminology is used solely for simplifying the example and doesn’t denote the actual inner workings of the WDDM in any way since this is indeterminable.
• GPU Threading:
  • A GPU process runs as a thread on the GPU and allows CPU-like multi-threading on a regular CPU. This means that you can spaw multiple Direct3D processes on a single GPU, thus WDDM must support the following item on this list.
• GPU Interruptibility:
  • Allows process interruption, which means that you can switch from one GPU process to another without the process losing its context and resources.
• Direct3D Surface Sharing:
  • Allows for a different process to access a D3D10 surface. This is necessary for the DWM (Desktop Window Manager) to function properly to allow for a final Desktop composition.
• Other Features:
  • Allows for a Display Driver restart on failure without requiring a total reboot.

The Main Problem

Since the functionality introduced in WDDM is Kernel-Mode, there is no chance this could be implemented into Windows XP unless a total rewrite of the XPDM is initiated. The reason for this is that developers don’t have access to the underlying hardware directly, only through the usage of APIs such as Direct3D or OpenGL. This conversion of XPDM, naturally, will not happen since Windows XP is being deprecated in favor of Windows Vista.

While there have been attempts at porting Direct3D 10 / DirectX 10 over to Windows XP, this will always continue to be the main problem.

Alternative Solution

Using Direct3D 10 as it is provided in Windows Vista in Windows XP is impossible. Yet there is a possibility to achieve the same graphics quality on hardware that supports it on Windows XP; by using the OpenGL API instead. OpenGL allows the developer to access the same functionality provided by Direct3D 10 by using so-called IHV provided extensions but that’s an entirely different article. Also, note that this would only provide the same features which Direct3D provides and none of the WDDM functionality unless you find a way to emulate the Kernel-Mode functionality in User-Mode in Windows XP.

Intel GMA 945 / GMA 950 thoughts

2008-01-07 less than 1 minute read

Over the last week I’ve been annoyed with the capabilities of the Intel 945GM chipset. While this chipset is not widely supported in graphics development, it’s a common chipset that Intel has to offer that comes standard with a bunch of PCs. So I’ve unhooked my Graphics card and attempted to run some of my code through this GPU.

Direct3D seems to work fine, pretty fast too. Pixel Shader version 2.0 seems to be supported through hardware, and Pixel Shader 3.0 through a software device. Now, you’d expect that the OpenGL implementation would have the same capabilities, or at least Pixel Shader 2.0 through hardware.

Turns out that the OpenGL version on this device is OpenGL 1.4 with to my knowledge no support for fragment shaders (GL_FRAGMENT_PROGRAM_ARB). I wonder why this is. The hardware capability is available, why not make use of it?

Valve’s hardware survey at the time of this post still reports that 22,183 people out there have the Intel (ialmrnt5.dll) driver. If so many gamers are using Intel’s chipsets, you can expect the regular end user base to be much larger. Why not give them some updates? Please? :o)

New Year’s Update

2008-01-04 less than 1 minute read

First of all, happy new year to you all even though it’s a bit late. Have some cake.

I’ve been keeping busy with some new “projects” lately, most involve OpenGL and Direct3D but more on this later when I have something to show or share.

Right now I’ve been disappointed with the stability of the new Visual Studio version, 2008. While there are some great new features for C++ programmers, my debugger seems to crash every now and then when debugging native code. I wonder if any of you out there have had the same problems…

Nevertheless, I like the new version and what its capable of concerning native C++.

Visual Studio 2008 Released to MSDN Subscribers

2007-11-20 1 minute read

While Visual Studio was originally planned to be released in February of 2008, November 19th 2007 seemed like a better release date for Microsoft. MSDN Subscribers can already download the Retail versions of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Standard and the Visual Studio Express editions through their Top Subscriber Downloads screen when logged on to MSDN.

At the moment downloads seem very slow (probably due to high network traffic) and connections might fail. Remember: because Microsoft is offering this through the Top Subscriber Downloads box, the downloads will open in an Akamai window instead of the regular Transfer Manager offered by Microsoft; this causes problems.

Click here to log into your MSDN subscriber Account

Coming Soon to MSDN Subscriptions – Visual Studio 2008 The next version of Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, will provide an industry-leading developer experience for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web. We expect to have Visual Studio 2008 editions available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads shortly after release. For a faster, more reliable download experience, please utilize “Top Downloads” below. All English Visual Studio 2008 editions will be available here first. Visual Studio 2008 editions also will be released—on a staggered schedule—to Subscriber Downloads. To find out more about the new versions, see the Visual Studio Developer Center. All English Visual Studio 2008 Editions will be available from “Top Downloads” below. Please utilize “Top Downloads” for a faster, more reliable download experience.

MSDN Blog post

OpenGL 3.0: Finally some news!

2007-10-30 2 minute read

After waiting for a long time an update has been issued about the OpenGL 3.0 specification. While this is an update, there is still no specification but the promise that the OpenGL ARB is working hard on the spec is below.

You understandably want to know where the OpenGL 3 specification is. I have good news and some bad news. First the bad news. Obviously, the specification isn’t out yet. The OpenGL ARB found, after careful review, some unresolved issues that we want addressed before we feel comfortable releasing a specification. The good news is that we’ve greatly improved the specification since Siggraph 2007, added some functionality, and flushed out a whole lot of details. None of these issues we found are of earth-shocking nature, but we did want them discussed and resolved to make absolutely sure we are on the right path, and we are. Rest assured we are working as hard as we can on getting the specification done. The ARB meets 5 times a week, and has done so for the last two months, to get this out to you as soon as possible. Getting a solid specification put together will also help us with the follow-ons to OpenGL 3: OpenGL Longs Peak Reloaded and Mount Evans. We don’t want to spend time fixing mistakes made in haste.

Here’s a list of OpenGL 3 features and changes that we decided on since Siggraph 2007:

• State objects can be partially mutable, depending on the type of the state object. These state objects can still be shared across contexts. This helps in reducing the number of state objects needed in order to control your rendering pipeline. For example, the alpha test reference value is a candidate to be mutable.
• We set a minimum bar required for texturing and rendering. This includes:
  • 16 bit floating point support is now a requirement for textures and renderbuffers. Supporting texture filtering and blending is still option for these formats.
  • S3TC is a required texture compression format
  • Interleaved depth/stencil is a required format for FBO rendering
  • At least one GL3-capable visual or pixel format must be exported which supports front-buffered rendering.
• OpenGL 3 will not have support for the GL_DOUBLE token. This means it will not be possible to send double precision vertex data to OpenGL.
• A format object has to be specified per texture attachment when a Program Environment Object is created. This helps minimize the shader re-compiles the driver might have to do when it discovers that the combination of shader and texture formats isn’t natively supported by the hardware.
• GL 3 will only cache one error, and that is the oldest error that occurred.
• The OpenGL pipeline will be in a valid state once a context is created. Various default objects, created as part of the context creation, will have reasonable default values. These values are such that a simple polygon will be drawn into the window system provided drawable without having to provide a Vertex array object, vertex shader or fragment shader.
• GLSL related changes:
  • GLSL 1.30 will support a #include mechanism. The actual shader source for the #include is stored in a new type of object, A “Text Buffer” object. A text buffer object also has a name property, which matches the string name specified in a #include directive.
  • Legacy gl_* GLSL state variables are accessible through a common block.

More details will follow soon in an upcoming OpenGL Pipeline newsletter.

Barthold Lichtenbelt
OpenGL ARB Working Group chair

A retrospective view of a 1996 Steve Jobs interview

2007-10-22 3 minute read

I know it’s easy to sit back and criticize what someone said 11 years ago. That’s why I won’t criticize Steve Jobs for what he said, rather, I’d like to show the difference of what the prediction was and what the reality is at the moment - regardless of who said it.

On a side note: It doesn’t matter if you like Apple, Steve Jobs or any of the associated parties, Jobs is an incredible innovator and one of the great digital-minds of the 20th (and turns out 21st) century. In all honesty, I personally do not “like” Apple’s machines and Operating System but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the innovation that they have brought about in the field of computing and computer software - it is simply mind boggling when you research it.

This blog post (remember that it’s an informal blog post) is a personal view of an interview that Steve Jobs gave to Wired Magazine in 1996 and was published online at Aether.com. Interestingly enough, 1996 was the year that Apple bough NeXT (Jobs’ company at the time) and informally hired Jobs back. This interview precedes those events. I’ll only pick things that are somewhat relevant to this site or that I find interesting; this is a blog, you know?

The desktop computer industry is dead

This will be the first thing that’ll pop out of the page. While at first this might sound like a ridiculous claim, you must place it in context with the entire section. For someone who was at the birth of Desktop computing, the 90’s might have seemed extremely dull in comparison to the 70’s and 80’s when many new things started to come into existence (The PC, CD-ROM, color displays, GUI, the Mouse, HDDs became cheaper, etc.).

When I went to Xerox PARC in 1979, I saw a very rudimentary graphical user interface. It wasn’t complete. It wasn’t quite right. But within 10 minutes, it was obvious that every computer in the world would work this way someday.

While this view was shared by competitors it has proven to be about 99% right. Almost every computer in the world works with some sore of user interface albeit underdeveloped. With the exception of pure Unix-based machines and low-level terminals, I can’t think of any other Operating System that doesn’t have an integrated GUI.

Objects are just going to be the way all software is going to be written in five years or - pick a time. It’s so compelling.

It took about five years for software developers to completely grasp Object Oriented Programming and to apply it correctly so in this regards Jobs was right. OOP has become the norm. While there are still many programmers out there that write procedural code, OOP has largely taken over — and that’s a good thing in most cases.

The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years.

Jobs was a bit off here. While the dot-com boom didn’t change the entire world, it did change the way that we use and look at the web in most parts of the worlds. I can’t think of many countries that don’t have internet access or people that have never heard of the internet besides underdeveloped or oppressed civilizations.

I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information.

While I do see Jobs’ point (he mentions information-overload and the ability to process information) we only tend to gather the information that we really care about and massive amounts of it. For example, Wikipedia is one of the most active websites on the internet used daily by a massive amount of people.

As to what’s now known as e-Commerce:

I think we’re still two years away.

A bit too optimistic but pretty accurate. Again, the dot-com boom pretty much exploded e-commerce into our lives which happened around 2000-2001.

End thought: The thing that struck me most in this interview was the amount of expectancy in regards to technology that Jobs has. It’s something to think about. “Am I as an end-user the catalyst of innovation?” or “If I expect more, will I get more?” It should be that way but it often isn’t. Companies don’t really seem to listen that much to their customers with the rogue exception here and there. In the end Jobs seems to be pretty accurate with his predictions of the future I’d like to say more so than another software icon but then I’d just be trolling around.

Jobs on the topic of superior European washing machines:

I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

Re: Microsoft Open Source

2007-10-20 1 minute read

Matthew Mullenweg at Photomatt.net “predicts” that:

Microsoft will Open Source Windows before 2017.

While I usually like Matt’s posts — I get them through the Wordpress control panel — I think that he might be a bit off this time. The Windows kernel is still under constant development and was derived from the DOS base architecture first founded in 1981.

This means that DOS is now 26 years old, almost 27.

Since MS-DOS hasn’t been released under an Open Source license I think it’s ridiculous to say that MS Windows will be releasing it under an O.S. license any time in the distant future — even with Open Source getting more and more popular.

An older product, BASIC which was first released on the Altair in 1975 (32 years old) is no longer being developed, is no longer being shipped with any Microsoft Operating Systems but has evolved in Microsoft’s Visual Basic / Visual Basic .NET. Products which in their own right have helped form products like C# and the Visual Studio product line. While you could get the BASIC source “code” (in patch point form), later binary versions of BASIC aren’t open and haven’t been opened up ever since.

While Microsoft gives you many tools to build upon the Windows Platform, I don’t think that Microsoft will open the source to Windows, not even Windows 1.0. I might be wrong — and I hope I am — but I got a pretty good feeling that current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is more focussed on monetary rewards for him and Microsoft than anything else.

Source / Reference: Microsoft Open Source

NVSG: NVIDIA Scene Graph SDK 4.0

2007-10-08 less than 1 minute read

An update to NVIDIA’s powerful NVSG toolset has been released for usage with C++. The library takes advantage of OpenGL functionality and GPU optimizations to allow next-gen features to be displayed.

Get it while it’s hot.

Atom: a gem in the making

2007-10-06 1 minute read

Timothy Farrar over at FarrarFocus.com is creating a unique game called Atom. The reason why I call it unique is that unlike many games out there the content for Atom is 100% dynamic which means that (for example) everything can be set in motion. Here’s a quote from Timothy’s post on GameDev.net:

Atom started with the idea to go back to PC gaming’s roots (low risk investment, experimenting with technology, fun timeless gameplay, taking a wild idea from concept to market), while taking advantage of the power of modern hardware.

[…]

The graphics engine is completely unconventional, 100% dynamic (no static geometry, everything moves), and based on an animated solid hierarchical cellular representation with an “animation bone” for each cell which is linked into a physics/CFD engine which gives life to the world. Rendering is done via a special purpose painters order micro-impostor compositing engine (old-school, not based on polygons!) which also provides realistic motion blur. Content creation is done with a mix of hand controlled procedural generation.

Due to Atom’s unique world representation, you can literally zoom into the molecular structure of anything, even on the inside. This also works in reverse, Atom is able to simplify any structure, and thus has infinite level of detail control. A custom visible surface determination algorithm eliminates overdraw allowing for both wide and telephoto views inside and side any structure no matter how sparse or dense the geometry.

Source: GameDev.net

The concept seems very promising, I suggest watching this project grow. Another thing worth mentioning is that the API used to generate the images is OpenGL, not DirectX. Timothy has posted on his blog that SM 4.0 will might be added to the engine. This is good news for XP users since there will be no need to upgrade to Vista if you want to try out this game.

Check out the Atom project here and watch the videos.

The State of DirectX 10

2007-10-05 less than 1 minute read

Quite recently I released a small article discussing if you (as a developer) should upgrade to Vista to take advantage of DirectX 10 functionality only available in Windows Vista. Quite simply the answer was “yes” in my article. As a developer you should always take advantage of new technologies, specially if that technology will replace an existing technology.

HotHardware.com has released an article more aimed towards the end-user than the developer which discusses the State of DirectX 10. In this article both performance and image quality are evaluated to give a fair estimation.

It’s 13 pages long but worth the read, check it out at HotHardware.com.