DirectX8 Preview

Written: 9/3/2000
Written by: Tron

Introduction

Roughly every year, Microsoft sees fit to "up the ante" in the graphics API war with a new release of it's DirectX API. This year is no exception of course, with DirectX8 being the newest incarnation. In this article I'm going to briefly focus on the new features of the API, what they bring new to the table, and what you can expect out of DX8 as an end user.

This time around two parts of the previous API have combined, and a new application manager has been implemented. Here are the main components of DirectX8, and a simple overview of the changes that have occured.

DirectX Graphics.

This is a combination of the formerly separate DirectDraw and Direct3D API's. A lot of applications have to make use of both of these API's, so combining them was a good idea. It drastically reduced the complexity in initializing the API, and lowers the overall memory footprint. A new programmable vertex processing language is now implemented allowing morphing/tweening animation, matrix palette skinning, user-defined lighting models, general environment mapping, procedural geometry and any other developer-defined algorithm.  This addition adds a great deal of flexibility for the developer when dealing with vertex arrays. Programmable Pixel processing language enables programmers to write hardware shaders for per-pixel lighting/bump mapping, per-pixel environment mapping and to write their own shader routines. Multisample rendering and effects are now supported directly in the API (full scene antialiasing, motion-blur, depth of field ect). Sprite points are available, which enable high performance particle system rendering. 3-D Volume textures enable effects such as range-attenuation in per-pixel lighting, volume atmospheric effects and easy texturing of very complex geometry.  It's clear that the above feature implementations allow the API to strongly leverage the texturing and transform power of todays hottest hardware. This is not suprising however. More on that later....

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