June 2008 - DirectX SDK released

June 7, 2008

It will filter it’s way eventually to the proper areas on the MSDN, but if you don’t want to wait, here it is.

Here’s the what’s new for this release:

Significant Stability and Performance Improvements to PIX for Windows
PIX for Windows is significantly more stable, faster and easier to use. There are improvements to capture and replay, the mesh viewer, the shader debugger, pixel history, and support for DirectX features.

Single-frame capture and full-stream capture are now more than twice as fast.
PIX now has a unified method of handling errors that halts capture or playback as soon as an error (such as running out of memory) occurs. The error information is reported to the user and valid call information is recorded and shown whenever possible.
The shader debugger, mesh viewer and capture infrastructure are significantly more stable across different drivers and operating systems, including both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
The shader debugger has much better handling of Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 10 multi-sampled render targets.
Instanced draws and DrawAuto calls are now supported in the mesh viewer, shader debugger, and pixel history.
Predicated draw calls are now respected in the mesh viewer.
The Device, Shader Resource and Blend State views now display Direct3D 10.1-specific information when applicable.
For Direct3D 10, swap-chain information (IDXGISwapChain) is now displayed in addition to the device information.

xAPO Effects Library
This release contains a new XAudio2 effects library (XAPOFX), implemented using XAudio2’s native xAPO format for real-time DSP effects. The xapofx.lib library contains a mastering limiter, a new lightweight reverberation to complement the existing Eventide Reverb, and a 4-band equalizer effect.

New Articles
This release includes two new articles.

The Direct3D 10 Frequently Asked Questions article contains some of the frequently asked questions surrounding Direct3D 10
The DirectX Graphics Infrastructure (DXGI): Best Practices article describes some of the issues when porting a Direct3D 9 application to Direct3D 10. DXGI encapsulates the code for enumeration, swap-chain creation, and presentation that was previously handled by Direct3D 9.

New Samples
This release has two new samples.

The XAudio2CustomAPO sample demonstrates how to create custom audio processing objects (xAPOs).
The Autorun sample demonstrates working with User Account Control (UAC) and process elevation to initiate the installation process for a title and then launch the installed title.

Personally the items that interest me the most in this release….are the 2 articles. Having a “best practices” on using the DXGI, along with an updated Direct3D10 FAQ are very handy.

Posted in blog, directx90c