DirectX10.1 in H2 '07

why dont they name it WV1 - to me its much less confusing than the other names

 

d3d10 works only on d3d10 cards. dx9 or d3d9 for that matter is still supported on vista. Actually there are 2 d3d9 in vista the one we have today and d3d9ex with which older cards can make use of some of the new features of the new driver model

 

Sure there is such a list but unfortunately it is not public yet.

 

Some of the more recent DirectX SDKs have rather extensive documentation on what features are available in Direct3d10 (although be warned that the SDK is a ~300MB download!). Direct3d10 has no caps bits anymore and generally follows the Totalitarian Principle ("everything that is not forbidden is compulsory"), so if you read about a feature in the SDK documentation, it is supported on every D3D10 GPU- there is not a whole lot of wiggle room for IHVs to differentiate D3D10 GPUs on API features.

IIRC, the main highlights are:

• Shader Model 4: adds integer, boolean and indexable-array datatypes, and gets rid of both the assembly language and many resource limitations. It enforces 32-bit operation (FP32/INT32) across the line.
• Stream-Out from the Vertex Shader
• The long-awaited Geometry Shader
• Filtered Shadow Mapping
• Occlusion Queries and other hardware counters, and conditional rendering based on occlusion queries
• Multisampled 2D textures (similar to the recent OpenGL 'texture stack' extension); these presumably exist to permit render-to-texture with multisampling without forcing a downsample pass.
• 16-bit textures and framebuffers appear to be gone; the minimum is now 32-bit. FP16 textures/framebuffers are fully supported; D3D10 does not permit implementations to restrict the blend modes or texture filtering modes available for FP16.

I don't remember offhand if FP32 filtering/blending and render-to-vertex-array are supported. There doesn't seem to be any hard requirements on AA/AF modes available, though.

There are also a bunch of architectural improvements in D3D10 as well (user-space drivers, virtual memory, GPU context switch etc); these are not directly visible as new features to the users of D3D10 (although some of them require new hardware features of the D3D10 GPUs themselves), but will rather manifest themselves as subtle stability/performance improvements.

 

fp32 blending is required and filtering optional that i know thx for the rest.

What you mean with filtered shadow mapping exactly? DST is required and filtering like nvidia does it?

 

The basic idea is that you can take a texture, perform ordinary lookup, then compare a component of the texture against a value computed in the shader, then replace the texturing result with either solid black or solid white based on that comparison. This compare and replace is done just BEFORE the texture filtering. It is a generalization of the DST+PCF shadow mapping feature that Nvidia has had for ages.

 

I'm not using Vista as I type this (don't have the docs to hand), but I think 1-sample,0-quality is the only required MSAA format. I wrote some code a few days ago that lists a devices supported formats (upto 32 samples are allowed) and it seems to be about the same as under XP (that is, both D3D9 and D3D10 refrast's seem to support the same MSAA settings).

I'm really curious as to what these are now

Direct4D maybe - "It's so awesome we had to add an extra dimension"?

I'm on the Vista beta program and have been using D3D10 for about 8 months now and I haven't heard any names other than WGF1/WGF2/D3D10. Even on the NDA side of things I've not heard any speculation nor read any hints that anything other than "Direct3D 10" will be used.

Cheers,
Jack

 

Back in 2004 it was called "DirectX Next".

 

Well just have to wait and see i guess.

 

I don't know about AA, but SM3.0 already required "16xAF".