Eran Kampf
Eran Kampf
3 min read

DirectX February 2005 release

Microsoft have announced the latest update to the DirectX SDK.
You can download the it from here.

From the microsoft’s web :

The DirectX® Team is pleased to announce the final release of DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (February 2005)! This SDK release contains the first release of D3DX as a Dynamic Link Library, new graphics samples, new\updated technical articles, enhanced tools and updated documentation. Below are highlights of what is new in this SDK release. For a complete list of updates, please refer to the SDK Documentation “What’s News” sections.

SDK:

  • Windows 2000 is no longer a supported platform for the SDK.
  • All of the DirectShow components (Header, Libs, Utilities, Tools, and Samples) were moved to the extras folder.

New Samples and Technical Articles:

  • New “Top Issues for Windows Titles” article
  • New PRTCmdLine sample
  • New Managed HDRFormat sample
  • Updated “Install-on-Demand for Games” and “Gaming with Least-Privileged User Accounts” with information about patching

Tool Updates Enhancements to PIX have been made:

  • You can now capture the Microsoft Direct3D calls made by a single frame of your application and play them back within PIX.
  • When grabbing screenshots: – You can append an incrementing number, or the current frame number, to the screenshot filename. – You can specify whether to overwrite existing image files with the same filename. – You can specify whether to show or hide the mouse cursor in the screenshot.
  • New command-line options are available to: – Convert a .PIXRun file to a .csv format that can be read by Microsoft. – Save an exclusive-or comparison of two images to a file.

D3DX: Precomputed Radiance Transfer The precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) system has been enhanced:

  • New fast raytracing methods have been added for direct computation of ray/mesh intersections against a simulation scene.
  • GPU-accelerated direct-lighting computation now supports normal maps.

Math Library

  • D3DX math functions on X64 have been heavily optimized for 64-bit processors in this release.

HLSL Compiler

  • A series of improvements and bug fixes have been made to the HLSL compiler

Effects Framework

  • New functions have been added to allow a developer to specify parameters to be ignored by the effects system and managed directly by the application.

D3DX as a Dynamic-Link Library

  • Starting with this SDK release, D3DX is being released as a dynamic-link library (DLL). Updates to D3DX in the future will continue to ship as uniquely-named DLLs that exist side-by-side on the system. This allows for continued improvements to the library without imposing regression risk. D3DX9.lib is still provided as the import library for the DLL which your application can statically link against. See documentation for details.
  • The D3DX DLL included in the SDK is automatically installed as part of Installing DirectX with DirectSetup. If your application does not use D3DX, you can remove D3DX from the redistributable (see Directx redist.txt for details).
  • The statically-linked debug library (D3DX9dt.lib) has been removed; use D3DX9d.lib instead.

Other

  • D3DX for DirectX8 was removed from the SDK in December. This was not mentioned in the release notes for the December SDK.
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