The S3 ViRGE (Video and Rendering Graphics Engine) graphics chipset was one of the first 2D / 3D accelerators designed for the mass market.
64-569: Introduced in 1996 by then graphics powerhouse S3, Inc. , the ViRGE was S3's first foray into 3D-graphics. The S3/Virge was the successor to the successful Trio64V+ . ViRGE/325 was pin compatible with the Trio64 chip, retaining the DRAM -framebuffer interface (up to 4MB), and clocking both the core and memory up to 80 MHz. In Windows , Virge was benchmarked as the fastest DRAM-based accelerator of
128-493: A " retained mode " 3D API. Both types of API were already offered with the second release of Reality Lab before Direct3D was released. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw , both were based on COM . The retained mode API was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold
192-573: A concept of " feature levels ", but new features are supported exclusively by new hardware which expose feature level 10_1. The only available Direct3D 10.1 hardware as of June 2008 were the Radeon HD 3000 series and Radeon HD 4000 series from ATI ; in 2009, they were joined by Chrome 430/440GT GPUs from S3 Graphics and select lower-end models in GeForce 200 series from Nvidia . In 2011, Intel chipsets started supporting Direct3D 10.1 with
256-428: A direct replacement to S3's highly successful Trio/64 family. The ViRGE family delivered faster Windows acceleration in the same physical footprint as its predecessor. The introduction of competing hardware, 3dfx 's Voodoo Graphics and Rendition 's Verité, and game titles such as Id Software's popular Quake engine , resulted in an industry-wide shakeout. S3, along with other previously well-established VGA vendors in
320-442: A display system to be "Direct3D 10 compatible". This is a significant departure, with the goal of streamlining application code by removing capability-checking code and special cases based on the presence or absence of specific capabilities. Because Direct3D 10 hardware was comparatively rare after the initial release of Windows Vista and because of the massive install base of non-Direct3D 10 compatible graphics cards,
384-417: A few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, and gives developers more control over image quality. Features include finer control over anti-aliasing (both multisampling and supersampling with per sample shading and application control over sample position) and more flexibilities to some of the existing features (cubemap arrays and independent blending modes). Direct3D 10.1 level hardware must support
448-497: A geometry shader, increased generalization of resource access using a view, removed legacy hardware capability bits (caps). Direct3D 10.1 was announced by Microsoft shortly after the release of Direct3D 10 as a minor update. The specification was finalized with the release of November 2007 DirectX SDK and the runtime was shipped with the Windows Vista SP1 , which is available since mid-March 2008. Direct3D 10.1 sets
512-569: A greatly increased instruction count, and more C-like language constructs. In addition to the previously available vertex and pixel shader stages, the API includes a geometry shader stage that breaks the old model of one vertex in/one vertex out, to allow geometry to be generated from within a shader, thus allowing for complex geometry to be generated entirely by the graphics hardware. Windows XP and earlier are not supported by DirectX 10.0 and above. Furthermore, Direct3D 10 dropped support for
576-409: A lower level of hardware abstraction than earlier versions, enabling future applications to significantly improve multithreaded scaling and decrease CPU utilization. This is achieved by better matching the Direct3D abstraction layer with the underlying hardware, through new features such as Indirect Drawing, descriptor tables, concise pipeline state objects, and draw call bundles. Reducing driver overhead
640-606: A major update to the Direct3D API. Originally called WGF 2.0 (Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0), then DirectX 10 and DirectX Next, Direct3D 10 features an updated shader model 4.0 and optional interruptibility for shader programs. In this model shaders still consist of fixed stages as in previous versions, but all stages support a nearly unified interface, as well as a unified access paradigm for resources such as textures and shader constants. The language itself has been extended to be more expressive, including integer operations,
704-643: A more granular way; for example D3D11_FEATURE_D3D9_SIMPLE_INSTANCING_SUPPORT exposes partial support for instancing on feature level 9_1 and 9_2 hardware, otherwise fully supported from feature level 9_3 onward. Direct3D 11.X Direct3D 11.X is a superset of DirectX 11.2 running on the Xbox One . It includes some features, such as draw bundles, that were later announced as part of DirectX 12. Direct3D 11.3 shipped in July 2015 with Windows 10; it includes minor rendering features from Direct3D 12, while keeping
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#1732772486170768-551: A new version of the High Level Shader Language support for floating-point texture formats, Multiple Render Targets (MRT), Multiple-Element Textures, texture lookups in the vertex shader and stencil buffer techniques. Direct3D 9Ex (previously versioned 9.0L ("L" standing for Longhorn, the codename for Windows Vista)), an extension only available in Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11, allows
832-880: A render target, option to bind a subrange of a constant buffer to a shader and retrieve it, option to create larger constant buffers than a shader can access, option to discard resources and resource views, option to change subresources with new copy options, option to force the sample count to create a rasterizer state, option to clear all or part of a resource view, option to use Direct3D in Session 0 processes, option to specify user clip planes in HLSL on feature level 9 and higher, support for shadow buffer on feature level 9, support for video playback, extended support for shared Texture2D resources, and on-the-fly swapping between Direct3D 10 and 11 contexts and feature levels. Direct3D 11.1 includes new feature level 11_1, which brings minor updates to
896-554: A separate API. Direct3D subsumed all remaining DirectDraw API calls still needed for application development, such as Present(), the function used to display rendering results. Direct3D was not considered to be user friendly, but as of DirectX version 8.1, many usability problems were resolved. Direct3D 8 contained many powerful 3D graphics features, such as vertex shaders , pixel shaders , fog , bump mapping and texture mapping . Direct3D 9.0 (released in December, 2002) added
960-543: A separate feature level; each upper level is a strict superset of a lower level. Tessellation was earlier considered for Direct3D 10, but was later abandoned. GPUs such as Radeon R600 feature a tessellation engine that can be used with Direct3D 9/10/10.1 and OpenGL, but it's not compatible with Direct3D 11 (according to Microsoft). Older graphics hardware such as Radeon 8xxx, GeForce 3/4 had support for another form of tesselation (RT patches, N patches) but those technologies never saw substantial use. As such, their support
1024-414: A significant volume, Lego Island and Lego Rock Raiders , were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode API after DirectX 3.0. For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by
1088-692: A source or destination, MultisampleEnable only affects line rasterization (points and triangles are unaffected), and is used to choose a line drawing algorithm. This means that some multisample rasterization from Direct3D 10 are no longer supported, Texture Sampling – sample_c and sample_c_lz instructions are defined to work with both Texture2DArrays and TextureCubeArrays use the Location member (the alpha component) to specify an array index, support for TextureCubeArrays. Unlike Direct3D 10 which strictly required Direct3D 10-class hardware and driver interfaces, Direct3D 10.1 runtime can run on Direct3D 10.0 hardware using
1152-649: Is able to run on Direct3D 9 and 10.x-class hardware and drivers using the concept of "feature levels" , expanding on the functionality first introduced in Direct3D 10.1 runtime. Feature levels allow developers to unify the rendering pipeline under Direct3D 11 API and make use of API improvements such as better resource management and multithreading even on entry-level cards, though advanced features such as new shader models and rendering stages will only be exposed on up-level hardware. There are three "10 Level 9" profiles which encapsulate various capabilities of popular DirectX 9.0a cards, and Direct3D 10, 10.1, and 11 each have
1216-730: Is an update to the API that ships with Windows 8 . The Direct3D runtime in Windows 8 features DXGI 1.2 and requires new WDDM 1.2 device drivers. Preliminary version of the Windows SDK for Windows 8 Developer Preview was released on September 13, 2011. The new API features shader tracing and HLSL compiler enhancements, support for minimum precision HLSL scalar data types, UAVs (Unordered Access Views) at every pipeline stage, target-independent rasterization (TIR), option to map SRVs of dynamic buffers with NO_OVERWRITE, shader processing of video resources, option to use logical operations in
1280-432: Is available for Windows 95 and above, and is the base for the vector graphics API on the different versions of Xbox console systems. The Wine compatibility layer, a free software reimplementation of several Windows APIs, includes an implementation of Direct3D. Direct3D's main competitor is Khronos' OpenGL and its follow-on Vulkan . Fahrenheit was an attempt by Microsoft and SGI to unify OpenGL and Direct3D in
1344-1158: Is the main attraction of Direct3D 12, similarly to AMD's Mantle . In the words of its lead developer Max McMullen, the main goal of Direct3D 12 is to achieve "console-level efficiency" and improved CPU parallelism. Although Nvidia has announced broad support for Direct3D 12, they were also somewhat reserved about the universal appeal of the new API, noting that while game engine developers may be enthusiastic about directly managing GPU resources from their application code, "a lot of [other] folks wouldn't" be happy to have to do that. Some new hardware features are also in Direct3D 12, including Shader Model 5.1, Volume Tiled Resources(Tier 2), Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed UAV Load, Conservative Rasterization(Tier 1), better collision and culling with Conservative Rasterization, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), Standard Swizzles, Default Texture Mapping, Swap Chains, swizzled resources and compressed resources , additional blend modes , programmable blend and efficient order-independent transparency (OIT) with pixel ordered UAV. Pipeline state objects (PSOs) have evolved from Direct3D 11, and
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#17327724861701408-468: Is too slow for most real-time 3D applications and is typically only used for debugging. A new real-time software rasterizer, WARP , designed to emulate the complete feature set of Direct3D 10.1, is included with Windows 7 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 with the Platform Update; its performance is said to be on par with lower-end 3D cards on multi-core CPUs. As part of DirectX , Direct3D
1472-831: Is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if available on the graphics card , allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering , W-buffering, stencil buffering , spatial anti-aliasing , alpha blending , color blending, mipmapping , texture blending, clipping , culling , atmospheric effects, perspective-correct texture mapping , programmable HLSL shaders and effects. Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D overlay planes, and even sprites , providing
1536-693: The Microsoft Talisman page for details). DirectX 7.0 (released in September, 1999) introduced the .dds texture format and support for transform and lighting hardware acceleration (first available on PC hardware with Nvidia's GeForce 256 ), as well as the ability to allocate vertex buffers in hardware memory. Hardware vertex buffers represent the first substantive improvement over OpenGL in DirectX history. Direct3D 7.0 also augmented DirectX support for multitexturing hardware, and represents
1600-948: The Savage 3D . The ViRGE was ultimately replaced by the Savage 3D in S3's top-end graphics segment in 1998, which lacks support for the S3D API. However, at least one derivative ( Trio3D ) of the ViRGE remained in production even after the discontinuation of the Savage 3D. S3 Graphics S3 Graphics, Ltd. was an American computer graphics company. The company sold the Trio , ViRGE , Savage , and Chrome series of graphics processors. Struggling against competition from 3dfx Interactive , ATI and Nvidia , it merged with hardware manufacturer Diamond Multimedia in 1999. The resulting company renamed itself to SONICblue Incorporated , and, two years later,
1664-575: The Trio64 , made strong inroads with OEMs . S3 took over the high end 2D market just prior to the popularity of 3D accelerators. S3's first 3D accelerator chips, the ViRGE series, controlled half of the market early on but could not compete against the high end 3D accelerators from ATI , Nvidia , and 3Dfx . In some cases, the chips performed worse than software-based solutions without an accelerator. As S3 lost market share, their offerings competed in
1728-399: The video card on the user's computer does not support that feature, Direct3D will not emulate it, although it will compute and render the polygons and textures of the 3D models, albeit at a usually degraded quality and performance compared to the hardware equivalent. The API does include a Reference Rasterizer (or REF device), which emulates a generic graphics card in software, although it
1792-725: The 1990s, but was eventually canceled. In 1992, Servan Keondjian, Doug Rabson and Kate Seekings started a company named RenderMorphics, which developed a 3D graphics API named Reality Lab , which was used in medical imaging and CAD software. Two versions of this API were released. Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in February 1995, bringing its staff on board to implement a 3D graphics engine for Windows 95 . The first version of Direct3D shipped in DirectX 2.0 (June 2, 1996) and DirectX 3.0 (September 26, 1996). Direct3D initially implemented an " immediate mode " 3D API and layered upon it
1856-403: The API, in exchange for the time-to-market advantage to the licensing vendor. S3 texture compression support was one such feature, renamed as DXTC for purposes of inclusion in the API. Another was TriTech's proprietary bump mapping technique. Microsoft included these features in DirectX, then added them to the requirements needed for drivers to get a Windows logo to encourage broad adoption of
1920-504: The PC market, were unable to adapt to the rapidly evolving PC 3D graphics market, being relegated to sell into market segments where 3D graphics functionality was unimportant. Although the ViRGE sold well in the OEM market, poor Direct3D performance and lack of OpenGL support prevented the ViRGE from competing in the more lucrative 3D graphics segment. Between its birth in 1995 and retirement near
1984-500: The PSO is immutable. Root signatures introduce configurations to link command lists to resources required by shaders. They define the layout of resources that shaders will use and specifies what resources will be bound to the pipeline. A graphics command list has both a graphics and compute root signature, while a compute command list will have only a compute root signature. These root signatures are completely independent of each other. While
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2048-625: The Retained Mode. The Redmond team added the DrawPrimitive API that eliminated the need for applications to construct execute buffers, making Direct3D more closely resemble other immediate mode rendering APIs such as Glide and OpenGL . The first beta of DrawPrimitive shipped in February 1997, and the final version shipped with DirectX 5.0 in August 1997. Besides introducing an easier-to-use immediate mode API, DirectX 5.0 added
2112-604: The SetRenderTarget method that enabled Direct3D devices to write their graphical output to a variety of DirectDraw surfaces. DirectX 6.0 (released in August, 1998) introduced numerous features to cover contemporary hardware (such as multitexture and stencil buffers ) as well as optimized geometry pipelines for x87 , SSE and 3DNow! and optional texture management to simplify programming. Direct3D 6.0 also included support for features that had been licensed by Microsoft from specific hardware vendors for inclusion in
2176-562: The ViRGE did receive some S3D enhanced games, due in large part to the brand prestige S3 carried in this period. Some examples of the ViRGE-enhanced versions were: Terminal Velocity , Descent II , Monster Truck Madness , Tomb Raider , MechWarrior 2 , FX Fighter Turbo , Terracide , POD , Incoming , and Jedi Knight . With the successful launch of the Sony PlayStation home game-console, pressure
2240-560: The addition of two new texture compression algorithms for more efficient packing of high quality and HDR/alpha textures and an increased texture cache . First seen in the Release Candidate version, Windows 7 integrates the first released Direct3D 11 support. The Platform Update for Windows Vista includes full-featured Direct3D 11 runtime and DXGI 1.1 update, as well as other related components from Windows 7 like WARP , Direct2D , DirectWrite , and WIC . Direct3D 11.1
2304-781: The beginning, the immediate mode also supported Talisman 's tiled rendering with the BeginScene/EndScene methods of the IDirect3DDevice interface. No substantive changes were planned to Direct3D for DirectX 4.0 , which was scheduled to ship in late 1996 and then canceled. In December 1996, a team in Redmond took over development of the Direct3D Immediate Mode, while the London-based RenderMorphics team continued work on
2368-616: The brand names DeltaChrome and GammaChrome. In July 2011, HTC Corporation announced they were buying VIA Technologies' stake in S3 Graphics, thus becoming the majority owner of S3 Graphics. In November, the United States International Trade Commission ruled against S3 in a patent dispute with Apple. Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows . Part of DirectX , Direct3D
2432-402: The common-shader core, integer and bitwise shader operations, organization of pipeline state into 5 immutable state objects, organization of shader constants into constant buffers, increased number of render targets, textures, and samplers, no shader length limit, new resource types and resource formats, layered runtime/API layers, option to perform per-primitive material swapping and setup using
2496-584: The era. The VRAM-based version, ViRGE/VX , was actually slower in lower resolutions, but had a faster RAMDAC to support high-resolution modes not available on the 325. Part of S3's marketing plan for the ViRGE included the " S3D " standard, stating that members of the ViRGE family carried the S3D Graphics Engine . Games that supported ViRGE directly put this logo on their box so owners of the 3D card would know that it would run as well as possible on their computer. And, despite its lackluster 3D-speed,
2560-406: The features in other vendors' hardware. A minor update to DirectX 6.0 came in the February, 1999 DirectX 6.1 update. Besides adding DirectMusic support for the first time, this release improved support for Intel Pentium III 3D extensions. A confidential memo sent in 1997 shows Microsoft planning to announce full support for Talisman in DirectX 6.0, but the API ended up being canceled (See
2624-516: The first Direct3D 10-compatible games still provide Direct3D 9 render paths. Examples of such titles are games originally written for Direct3D 9 and ported to Direct3D 10 after their release, such as Company of Heroes , or games originally developed for Direct3D 9 with a Direct3D 10 path retrofitted later during their development, such as Hellgate: London or Crysis . The DirectX 10 SDK became available in February 2007. Direct3D 10.0 level hardware must support
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2688-516: The following features: Multisampling has been enhanced to generalize coverage based transparency and make multisampling work more effectively with multi-pass rendering, better culling behavior – Zero-area faces are automatically culled; this affects wireframe rendering only, independent blend modes per render target, new sample-frequency pixel shader execution with primitive rasterization, increased pipeline stage bandwidth, both color and depth/stencil MSAA surfaces can now be used with CopyResource as either
2752-436: The following features: the ability to process entire primitives in the new geometry-shader stage, the ability to output pipeline-generated vertex data to memory using the stream-output stage, multisampled alpha-to-coverage support, readback of a depth/stencil surface or a multisampled resource once it is no longer bound as a render target, full HLSL integration – all Direct3D 10 shaders are written in HLSL and implemented with
2816-607: The graphics portion was spun off into a new joint effort with VIA Technologies . The new company focused on the mobile graphics market. VIA Technologies' stake in S3 Graphics was purchased by HTC in 2011. S3 was founded and incorporated in January 1989 by Dado Banatao and Ronald Yara. It was named S3 as it was Banatao's third startup company. The company's first products were among the earliest graphical user interface (GUI) accelerators. These chips were popular with video card manufacturers, and their followup designs, including
2880-399: The hardware page tables present in many current GPUs. WARP was updated to fully support the new features. There is no feature level 11_2 however; the new features are dispersed across existing feature levels. Those that are hardware-dependent can be checked individually via CheckFeatureSupport . Some of the "new" features in Direct3D 11.2 actually expose some old hardware features in
2944-529: The hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were considered extremely awkward to program at the time, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D) Rather than adopt OpenGL as a gaming API, Microsoft chose to continue improving Direct3D, not only to be competitive with OpenGL, but to compete more effectively with other proprietary APIs such as 3dfx 's Glide . From
3008-575: The introduction of Intel HD Graphics 2000 (GMA HD). Direct3D 11 was released as part of Windows 7. It was presented at Gamefest 2008 on July 22, 2008 and demonstrated at the Nvision 08 technical conference on August 26, 2008. The Direct3D 11 Technical Preview has been included in November 2008 release of DirectX SDK. AMD previewed working DirectX11 hardware at Computex on June 3, 2009, running some DirectX 11 SDK samples. The Direct3D 11 runtime
3072-514: The mid-range market. Their next design, the Savage 3D , was released early and suffered from driver issues, but it introduced S3TC , which became an industry standard. S3 bought Number Nine 's assets in 1999, then merged with Diamond Multimedia . The resulting company renamed itself SONICblue, refocused on consumer electronics, and sold its graphics business to VIA Technologies . Savage-derived chips were integrated into numerous VIA motherboard chipsets . Subsequent discrete derivations carried
3136-414: The need to serve traditional 2D applications, the resulting 3D functionality was both limited and slow. When performing basic 3D-rendering with only texture mapping and no other advanced features, ViRGE's pixel throughput was somewhat faster than the best software-optimized (host-based CPU) 3D-rendering of the era, and with better (16bpp) color fidelity. But when additional rendering operations were added to
3200-405: The new concise pipeline states mean that the process has been simplified. DirectX 11 offered flexibility in how its states could be altered, to the detriment of performance. Simplifying the process and unifying the pipelines (e.g. pixel shader states) lead to a more streamlined process, significantly reducing the overheads and allowing the graphics card to draw more calls for each frame. Once created,
3264-444: The overall structure of the Direct3D 11.x API. Direct3D 11.3 introduces optional Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed Unordered Access View Loads, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), optional Standard Swizzle, optional Default Texture Mapping, Conservative Rasterization (out of three tiers), optional Unified Memory Access (UMA) support, and additional Tiled Resources (tier 2) (Volume tiled resources). Direct3D 12 allows
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#17327724861703328-476: The pinnacle of fixed-function multitexture pipeline features: although powerful, it was so complicated to program that a new programming model was needed to expose the shading capabilities of graphics hardware. Direct3D 7.0 also introduced DXVA features. DirectX 8.0 (released in November, 2000) introduced programmability in the form of vertex and pixel shaders , enabling developers to write code without worrying about superfluous hardware state. The complexity of
3392-483: The polygon load (such as perspective-correction, Z-depth fogging, and bilinear filtering ), rendering throughput dropped to the speed of software-based rendering on an entry-level CPU. 3D-rendering on the high-end VRAM based ViRGE/VX (988) was even slower than the less expensive ViRGE/325, due to the VX's slower core and memory clock rates. The upgraded ViRGE/DX and ViRGE/GX models did improve 3D rendering performance, but by
3456-527: The resolution, polygon count, and quality of shading, smoothing, etc. were not competitive with dedicated 3D rendering hardware. While the market demand was clearly present, realtime 3D graphics rendering was new and unfamiliar territory for S3 and many of its hardware competitors. With a sizable chunk of ViRGE's hardware real-estate already devoted to other key functions (such as the VGA-controller, 2D/BITBLT engine, RAMDAC, PCI and memory interface), and
3520-444: The retained mode API which had been a part of Direct3D since the beginning, making Windows Vista incompatible with 3D games that had used the retained mode API as their rendering engine . Unlike prior versions of the API, Direct3D 10 no longer uses "capability bits" (or "caps") to indicate which features are supported on a given graphics device. Instead, it defines a minimum standard of hardware capabilities which must be supported for
3584-586: The shader language, such as larger constant buffers and optional double-precision instructions, as well as improved blending modes and mandatory support for 16-bit color formats to improve the performance of entry-level GPUs such as Intel HD Graphics . WARP has been updated to support feature level 11_1. The Platform Update for Windows 7 includes a limited set of features from Direct3D 11.1, though components that depend on WDDM 1.2 – such as feature level 11_1 and its related APIs, or quad buffering for stereoscopic rendering – are not present. Direct3D 11.2
3648-408: The shader programs depended on the complexity of the task, and the display driver compiled those shaders to instructions that could be understood by the hardware. Direct3D 8.0 and its programmable shading capabilities were the first major departure from an OpenGL-style fixed-function architecture, where drawing is controlled by a complicated state machine. Direct3D 8.0 also eliminated DirectDraw as
3712-421: The time of their introduction they were still unable to distinguish the ViRGE family in an already crowded 3D market. Outside of 3D rendering, ViRGE was a solid performer in familiar tasks as DOS VGA and Microsoft Windows. Here, S3's substantial experience in high-performance Windows acceleration showed, with ViRGE benchmarking near the top among competing DRAM-based VGA cards. In OEM PC markets, ViRGE sold well as
3776-645: The use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media ties. Direct3D contains many commands for 3D computer graphics rendering; however, since version 8, Direct3D has superseded the DirectDraw framework and also taken responsibility for the rendering of 2D graphics . Microsoft strives to continually update Direct3D to support the latest technology available on 3D graphics cards. Direct3D offers full vertex software emulation but no pixel software emulation for features not available in hardware. For example, if software programmed using Direct3D requires pixel shaders and
3840-536: The use of the advantages offered by Windows Vista's Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) and is used for Windows Aero . Direct3D 9Ex, in conjunction with DirectX 9 class WDDM drivers allows graphics memory to be virtualized and paged out to system memory, allows graphics operations to be interrupted and scheduled and allow DirectX surfaces to be shared across processes. Direct3D 9Ex was previously known as version 1.0 of Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF). Direct3D 9Ex improvements - Win32 apps Windows Vista includes
3904-476: The year 2000, the ViRGE family received regular upgrades. The ViRGE/DX boosted the performance of the original ViRGE/325 by improving perspective correction and implementing a full-speed trilinear filter. The ViRGE/GX added support for more modern SD / SGRAM . The ViRGE/GX2 was one of the first VGA chipsets to support AGP , although the level of support extended little beyond electrical compliance. Substantial use of AGP's feature-set would have to wait until
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#17327724861703968-1019: Was dropped from newer hardware. Microsoft has also hinted at other features such as order independent transparency , which was never exposed by the Direct3D API but supported almost transparently by early Direct3D hardware such as Videologic's PowerVR line of chips. Direct3D 11.0 features include: Support for Shader Model 5.0, Dynamic shader linking, addressable resources, additional resource types, subroutines, geometry instancing, coverage as pixel shader input, programmable interpolation of inputs, new texture compression formats (1 new LDR format and 1 new HDR format), texture clamps to limit WDDM preload, require 8-bits of subtexel and sub-mip precision on texture filtering, 16K texture limits, Gather4(support for multi-component textures, support for programmable offsets), DrawIndirect, conservative oDepth, Depth Bias, addressable stream output, per-resource mipmap clamping, floating-point viewports, shader conversion instructions, improved multithreading. Other notable features are
4032-507: Was on the PC market to incorporate hardware that could compete in the area of realtime 3D graphics rendering, something that software-based host-CPU rendering could not do well on its own. That is, main-CPU software-based rendering could render realtime 3D graphics—as demonstrated by games like Descent , which used only the main CPU and standard VGA hardware to render full-screen 3D video with 6-degrees-of-freedom motion in real time—but
4096-413: Was shipped with Windows 8.1 . New hardware features require DXGI 1.3 with WDDM 1.3 drivers and include runtime shader modification and linking, Function linking graph(FLG), inbox HLSL compiler, option to annotate graphics commands. Feature levels 11_0 and 11_1 introduce optional support for tiled resources with shader level of detail clamp (Tier2). The latter feature effectively provides control over
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