SlimDX
Thursday, 13. March 2008, 18:45:14
As you may know Microsoft no longer supports Managed DirectX and wants you to use XNA instead. What if (for whatever reasons) you don't want to use xna? SlimDX to the rescue!
Basically, it's just a managed wrapper on top of pure DirectX with several additional classes like BoundingBox/Sphere/Frustrum, Ray etc. Yay for not having to learn a new API!
Most of the stuff is straightforward but since there isn't any proper documentation there are several "interesting" things you have to figure out yourself. My favorite one was that D3DXPlaneTransform() requires an inverse transpose of the transformation matrix, while SlimDX.Plane.Transform() does not. Oh the fun I had "debugging" that one...
And now, the important part: DO NOT download the ZIP (currently "SlimDX (Nov 07).zip"). It's very out of date and very useless. Just get it off the SVN and compile it yourself. It will save you a lot of headache.
p.s. Added a little poll. Let's see kind of hardware you have... I can't believe that currently SM4.x is at a 100%
Basically, it's just a managed wrapper on top of pure DirectX with several additional classes like BoundingBox/Sphere/Frustrum, Ray etc. Yay for not having to learn a new API!
Most of the stuff is straightforward but since there isn't any proper documentation there are several "interesting" things you have to figure out yourself. My favorite one was that D3DXPlaneTransform() requires an inverse transpose of the transformation matrix, while SlimDX.Plane.Transform() does not. Oh the fun I had "debugging" that one...
And now, the important part: DO NOT download the ZIP (currently "SlimDX (Nov 07).zip"). It's very out of date and very useless. Just get it off the SVN and compile it yourself. It will save you a lot of headache.
p.s. Added a little poll. Let's see kind of hardware you have... I can't believe that currently SM4.x is at a 100%
Where the vote goes if I have SM4.0 card but not on Vista? Likewise, if I have multiple different cards?
By anonymous user, # 13. March 2008, 20:17:21
BTW, Intel GMA might be SM2.0 (GMA900/950), SM3.0 (GMA X3xxx) or supposedly even SM4.0 (GMA 4500+).
By anonymous user, # 13. March 2008, 20:19:06
AFAIK, GMA950 supports pixel shader 2.0 but vertex shaders only work with software vertex processing.
I believe intel supports SM4.0 starting from GMA X3100, but from what I've heard, there are no drivers, so...
Edited the poll, if you have multiple cards, you can choose multiple answers.
By nerius, # 14. March 2008, 08:35:34