DirectX 10

[imported_jzimo]

According to Microsoft DirectX 10 will be realeased when Vista comes out. Does this mean that the next line of graphics card will support DirectX 10 and shader model 4.0?

 

[otispunkmeyer]

i wouldnt be suprised if theyre not already there

G70 goes beyond the SM3 spec, and im sure R520 will do to. that crytek demo was run on current hardware apparently so

 

[gsellis]

A little more info from this blog (link origanally found through msdn) http://www.thezbuffer.com/

See the original for the correct, bulleted format

PDC05: The DirectX 10 talk
This will just be a quick summary of some of the points from the 2 DirectX talks they had at PDC. They were well attended - the first one had to have an overflow room.

DirectX 10 is the name of the game, they didn't mention WGF once.
Vista will ship with both DirectX 9 (which contains all the backward compatible stuff (dx8,7,6, direct draw etc) and DirectX10 which REQUIRES DX10 hardware (non exists yet) and will not be backward compatible.
The DX9 implementation will run all the old programs with no code changes. This is quite amazing considering that in Vista programs have to share the graphics card with the OS.
There will be some extensions to DX9 that you can take advantage of in Vista.
If your graphics card is using the new Vista driver model then GDI/GDI+ has *NO* hardware acceleration. In practise this shouldn't be a big deal since the CPUs are so darn fast these days.
No more managing the memory yourself and worrying about when to create things. Memory is now shared and the OS decides when to page things up to the graphics card.
No more DeviceLost (Yay). In fact the only time you can lose the device is if someone pulls the card or the drivers get updated. Generally only things that long running apps (like VISTA) have to worry about. [and those of you wondering how you can unplug a card need to think about laptops that have an auxiliary graphics card in the docking station]
Can't interleave GDI and DX on the same surface any more.
DX10 supports some new pipeline features:
Geometry Shader: Runs after the vertex shader. Has visibility to the entire data stream including adjacency etc. Can add ro remove data from the stream meaning that you can create geometry on the fly. They had a cool demo of a particle system running totally on the GPU and a scene that had dynamically growing vines, also 100% on the GPU
Input Streams: This is a way of piping data out of one stage and back into earlier stages next time though. Essential for these totally 100% on the GPU programs. The CPU never has to modify the data.
Predicated Rendering: Based on a decision earlier in the shader pipeline you can decide not to do something later. The example they showed was to render the bounding box around a complex object and then check if the box was occluded. If it was then the complex mesh also must be occluded so it is never ever passed through the pipeline.
Updated 9/15/2005 9:50:00 AM by Zman

 

[eplebnista]