ON The Insider:
Heidi Klum's Legs Worth $2M
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Direct3D and Device Independence |
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| Direct3D, bi-linear filtering, z-buffering - all this 3-D terminology can be confusing. Hopefully, after reading this material, you'll have a better grasp of just what it all means. | ||||
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| To explain Direct3D, we need to review a bit of history. In the beginning,
there was DOS, which had two major disadvantages, the most obvious being
the user interface - or rather the lack thereof, as anyone who spent any
amount of time staring at that infuriating command prompt can attest to.
Another serious disadvantage to DOS was that when someone developed software that required interaction with a piece of hardware, |
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that piece of hardware had to talk specifically and directly to that particular product. For example, if developers wanted their game to make a sound, they had to write software telling the game just which sound card was in the computer. If a user had a sound card that wasn't supported by your game, they were stuck playing in silence. | |||
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| The introduction of Windows solved both problems. While the most apparent advantage was the easier user interface, the implementation of "device-independence" was equally important. With Windows, a title developer can pretty much tell the application to "play a sound," and if the sound card installed in the computer has a Windows driver (and they all do), a sound plays. | ||||
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| All this extra interface, however, caused serious performance deficiencies, and game vendors continued to write for DOS, doing the extra work in the name of speed. So Microsoft, with Windows 95, developed the DirectX drivers (including Direct3D), which ideally give everyone the best of both worlds: the freedom of device-independence coupled with the immediate hardware access of DOS. Unfortunately, Direct3D was completed long after cheap 3-D hardware had already become available to game developers. As a result, you see plenty of games developed for DOS and developed to take advantage of one particular chip only. | ||||
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It remains to be seen whether the trend of continuing to develop games for specific boards will continue, or whether the gaming community will fully embrace the Direct3D standard. | |||
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