Microsoft Shows Off Beta of DirectX 6.0

Microsoft announced the beta release of its DirectX 6.0 SDK (Software Development Kit) for developers at CGDC on Tuesday. The early beta release should enable gaming developers to begin implementing 6.0's new features into games in time for the 1998 holiday buying season.

The final release of the multimedia API is expected for public consumption sometime in July.

Rather than just having tons of support on Windows 95 and very little support on Windows NT, Microsoft is pushing the API for all of its OS platforms including Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 5.0. This is great news for gamers who want the security and features that NT offers without having to dual boot to Windows 95 just to play games.

In part, this is accomplished through Microsoft's new Win32 Driver Model (WDM). Rather than having a hardware manufacturer make two sets of drivers, one for Windows 95 and another for Windows NT, both Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0 will be able to use the same drivers. Not only will this make for less work for hardware driver developers, but will make for fewer headaches for gamers looking to get drivers for either OS.

DirectX 6.0 is also backward compatible with all versions of DirectX 6.0 (so if you have a DirectX 5.0 game, it will still run).

Microsoft says that DirectX 6.0 will give games better graphics, faster frame rates, and enhanced playability along with new hardware features like DVD playback, multi-monitor support, and Universal Serial Bus (USB).

New features for DirectX3D include: - Multiple Textures support, which will allow a gaming engine to apply multiple textures to polygons in an environment in a single pass.- New Rasterizers will give developers the option to build complete software renderers for systems that don't have special hardware.- Geometry Pipeline Features give developers more options for geometry layouts.- DrawPrimitives2 DDI will give programs faster access to device drivers. - Texture Memory Manager gives developers more options to work with texture support.- Bump Mapping, which will give games a new bonus with textured formats that emulate real-life dimples, bumps, and creases.

And other DirectX3D features like Flexible Vertex Format, Vertex Buffers, Standard Fixed-Rate Texture Compression, Opaque Texture Surfaces, Alpha in Texture Palettes, Luminance Surfaces, Stencil Planes, W-Buffering, Range-Based Fog, and Z-Buffer Clearing.

DirectDraw will also get some updating: - Motion Compensation gives hardware that supports this feature a 20-40 percent performance boost in rendering MPEG2 movies. - Hardware De-Interlacing Support will match your monitor's frame rate to frame rate of video through the use of interpolation between frames.

The newest addition to the DirectX lineup is DirectMusic, which will bring high-quality music to the Windows platform.

Features for DirectMusic include a high-quality sequencer for MIDI playback, support for DownLoadable Sounds (DLS) with wave-table-enabled soundcards, or a low-overhead software synthesizer for those without wave-table cards, and interactive music composition so musicians can add information to music scores that will tell DirectMusic how to adapt the music according to gamers' actions.

New DirectPlay features include: - Guaranteed Messaging, which will allow messages to be delivered over networks including IPX, head-to-head modem, and better support than a standard TCP connection for multiplayer gaming.- Firewall Support, which will add fixed ports for simplified setups for network gaming.

Developers will receive the beta version of DirectX 6.0 during CGDC. Registered DirectX beta not at CGDC will receive a copy of the beta as well.