DX10 was originally called
Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF 2.0) before being renamed back to Direct X with incremented version number.
New features:
* Shader Model 4.0
* Geometry shaders ¹
* Texture arrays
* Predicated rendering (faster occlusion culling)
* Geometry instancing
Changes:
* Unified shader interface
Dropped:
* Audio hardware acceleration ³
Deprecated:
* Optional features ²
¹ Allows geometry calculations to be moved to the GPU
² A change noticeable only by programmers whose job should be now much easier with the differences between hardware implementations being more transparent.
³ Can still be accomplished with
OpenAL and drivers that support OAL's hardware acceleration.
Sanguine 2007-10-19 22:45:07