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Archive for September, 2009

DirectX August 2009 SDK is released

September 10, 2009 Jendrik Illner Leave a comment

Also today is the 10.September 2009, Microsoft released the August SDK today.  The 550MB download is available here

The first thing you will see when you try to open the documentation is that the Documentation is now longer one single file. It’s now placed in two different files and it looks like the Documentation isn’t really completely organized by now. It looks like they wanted to get the SDK out.

You will find the Documentation in the \Documentation\DirectX9 folder,all documentation is placed here. I think the location will change in the next release. This doesn’t look right.

One file is called directx_sdk.chm and contains the documentation for the following technologies

  • DirectX Audio
  • DirectX Input (XInput and DirectInput)
  • Windows Games Explorer
  • Technical Articles
  • Samples and Tutorials

The Samples and Tutorials section also contains the samples for XAudio2, XInput, DirectInput, Direct3D 11, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 9.

The documentation for the Graphics Technologies are now placed in there own files. In the same \Documentation\DirectX9  folder, you can find the windows_graphics.chm file. This is the documentation for the Graphics Technologies with following content

  • Direct3D 11 Graphics
  • Direct3D 10 Graphics
  • Direct3D 9 Graphics
  • DXGI
  • HLSL
  • Tools for DirectX Graphics

If your are using windows Vista keep an eye on the following site , when it’s available. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=160189

This release, is build for the DirectX 11 Runtime. This runtime is installed on Windows 7 RTM versions but has to be installed on Vista machines via a system update. The link will provide more information about it.
I also tested some samples on the Windows 7 Beta and they worked. I don’t have a Vista system to test on but the documentation says some sample may crash on vista without installing the DirectX 11 Runtime.

Interesting new and updated Samples:

The SubD11 Sample once again got updated.  It now contains this nice looking human-model. This samples shows the use of the new Tessellation stage in D3D11, the model also shows skeletal-animation.
Because you have to use the reference device, I really doesn’t make fun to play around with the different settings. Hopefully ATI and NVIDIA will release a D3D11 graphics card quickly.

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VarianceShadows11 Sample demonstrates how to integrate cascaded shadow maps with variance shadow maps.

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Compute Shader

Also interesting are the new samples for DirectCompute but they have nothing interesting to show on pictures. When you are running Windows 7 with the newest NVIDIA (ATI currently doesn’t have a driver to support it) You can run those samples using DirectCompute using the 4.0 level.

That’s enough for now. Have fun exploring the SDK on your own, I will have it :)

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