More new features of DirectX 10

Other additions and improvements

With all of this talk about the new additions to DirectX 10 and the new driver model, we tend to look past some of the important things that have been upgraded from the previous version. A few of these areas that have been refined are:

HDR Lighting – Two new floating point HDR formats for DX10-compliant GPUs: Added additional support in DirectX 10 for HDR formats to more compactly represent HDR data, making it possible to use HDR more efficiently

Virtualized memory for the GPU – In the past, the amount of texture storage was limited by the amount of onboard memory the graphics processor held. Now textures can be stored on system memory, eliminating the memory bottleneck on texture size.

Better geometry instancing – Geometry instancing, first introduced to DX9 in shader model 3.0, has been tweaked in DirectX 10. The enhancements that have been made provide more customization for developers (for example, providing unique animations for objects (like ground units in an RTS game) that are rendered via instancing).

Increase in memory texture - increased the maximum texture dimensions in DX10. They were 2048x2048 or 4096x4096 in DirectX 9, and in DX10 they're 8192x8192.

XInput – Taken from the XBOX360, this API was modified for use on Windows Vista. This enables the use of all the controls and components involved in the peripherals. Now users will have the ability to use XBOX360 peripherals with Windows Vista.

DirectSound - some minor upgrades have been made to it to bring it up to date. In the future there will be some additional changes, but none that stand out.

Stream Output – Allows storing output from geometry shader to buffer. Enables multi-pass operations on geometry, i.e. recursive subdivision and to store results of skinning to buffer to reuse for multiple lights. Also, can use the functions DrawAuto() to automatically draw the correct number of primitives without CPU intervention.


Alongside what we have talked about thus far there are far many more refinements that have been made to DirectX 10. These are some of the biggest changes we’ve found, but we wanted to hear what the people who will actually be using the new API to create games had to say. For this, we turned to Epic Games Tim Sweeney!