The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Cross-Reference

By Sebastien St-Laurent
ISBN 0-9766132-1-2
Jan 2006 (896 pages)

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Page 92

...emantics can easily be divided into four categories: vertex shader input, vertex shader output, pixel shader input and pixel shader output. Over the next few pages, I will present the four categories in a set of tables describing the semantics and their meaning. Keep in mind that in the tables below...

Page 182

...gs which may also apply to the compilation of this shader. The ppShader parameter is simply a buffer meant to contain the DWORD stream resulting from the shader compilation. The ppErrorMsgs parameter is a buffer, which will be .lled with at least the .rst compilation error, if any. And . nally, the ...

Page 51

{ // Determine the distance from the light to the vertex and the direction.oat3 LightDir = LightPos - VertPos;.oat Dist = length(LightDir);LightDir = LightDir / Dist;

Page 99

...ular shader. Although you may write your code using intrinsic HLSL instructions, you may want to consider what the function will generate once compiled. A more complete description of how each intrinsic HLSL function is compiled has been included in the appendices and will show some concrete example...

Page 24

... how the graphics hardware is based on vectors. As you can see, the vector data type just discussed closely maps to the hardware, and the compiler will map your data to hardware vectors. When you use vectors smaller than four entries, the compiler will try and compact the data by stuf.ng other varia...

Features Added in the December 2004 DirectX SDK Update

This page is a record of the features that were added in the DirectX December 2004 update. To see the latest features in the SDK, see What's New in the DirectX SDK.

SDK Updates
Graphics Updates
Technical Articles

SDK Updates

The following features have been updated in the SDK:

Content Tools
Performance Tools
SDK Samples

Content Tools

DirectX tools are now documented in DirectX SDK Tools. Tools for programming and debugging shaders (which is primarily a graphics topic) are located in Graphics Tools.

The tools are now located in (SDK root)\Utilities\Bin\x86 or x64. The corresponding path to the source files is: (SDK root)\Utilities\Source\x86 or x64.

The DirectX Extensions for Alias Maya now supports options to control the set of exported data, and it can export and preview smooth skinned meshes.

The debug monitor (Dbmon.exe) has been removed from the SDK, but it can still be found in the Platform SDK.

The force feedback editor (Fedit.exe) has been removed from the SDK.

Performance Tools

The following enhancements have been made to PIX:

A collection of countersets is provided as a starting point for you to record useful runtime data from your application.
A new key combination trigger is provided.
You can now set triggers to recur.
Options are available to display PIX information on top of your running application.
You can set a call capture action on a single frame.
Full stream capture performance is improved.
You can launch experiment and log files, or open image files, simply by dragging them onto a PIX window.
The tool is compatible with older versions of DirectX.
Many bugs have been fixed.

D3DSpy has been removed. Nearly all of its functionality is duplicated by PIX.

SDK Samples

The following samples are upgrades are available in the update:

Samples and tool source code now use safer string functions.
Project and solution files for both Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2002 and Visual Studio .NET 2003 are now provided.
A new Install-on-Demand for Games sample.

Graphics Updates

The following features have been updated in the graphics component:

D3DX
Graphics Samples

D3DX

The following new features were added to D3DX:

Effects - The SetPixelShader and SetVertexShader methods have been removed from ID3DXBaseEffect, ID3DXEffect, and ID3DXEffectCompiler. These methods do not perform well within the effect framework when shaders are swapped at run time. Use the following methods instead: SetPixelShader and SetVertexShader
PRT - ID3DXPRTEngine::ComputeConvCoeffs method has been renamed to ComputeLDPRTCoeffs to reflect its use with locally-deformable precomputed radiance transfer (LDPRT).
New optional parameters have been added to the following functions: D3DXCreatePRTCompBuffer, D3DXCreatePRTEngine.
The following new functions, and methods have been added: D3DXComputeTangentFrame, D3DXComputeTangentFrameEx, ComputeSSAdaptive, omputeSurfSamplesBounce, omputeSurfSamplesDirectSH, SetMinMaxIntersection.

Graphics Samples