What's New in the April 2005 DirectX SDK

This page is a record of the features that were added in the DirectX April 2005 update. To see the latest features in the SDK, see What's New in the October 2006 DirectX SDK.

• SDK Updates
• Graphics Updates
• Technical Article Updates

SDK Updates

The following features have been updated in the SDK:

• Documentation
• Performance Tools
• Content Tools

Documentation

Setup documentation - The DXSetup documentation has been updated to explain the redist naming scheme and how you can customize the redist to reduce your installation size. See Installing DirectX with DirectSetup.

Performance Tools

Enhancements to the PIX performance analysis tool include:

• You can now open full-stream capture PIXRun files, and render frames from them within PIX, the same way you can with single-frame capture PIXRun files (see Analyzing PIX Data).
• You can save rendered frames to an image file from within PIX.
• You can adjust the scaling of the Y-axis of the event timeline to see data graphed more clearly (see TimeLine View).

Content Tools

Enhancements to the DirectX Extensions for DCC applications include:

• The Installing DirectX with DirectSetup plug-in has been added to support exporting data to the DirectX X-File format (.x).

Graphics Updates

The following features have been updated in the graphics component:

• D3DX
• DXUT

D3DX

The following new features were added to D3DX:

• UVAtlas API - These new API's (see UVAtlas Functions) automatically generate a unique UV texture mapping for an arbitrary mesh, maximizing texture space usage and minimizing texture undersampling (stretch). See Using UVAtlas.
• Reduced effects memory footprint - A new flag (D3DXFX_NOT_CLONEABLE ) has been added to allow users to specify that an effect will never need to be cloned by the effect system. Using this flag can notably reduce the memory footprint for an effect.
• Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT)
  • Passing in a NULL parameter for sample locations in the ComputeVolumeSamples API's (see ID3DXPRTEngine) will result in transfer matrices being computed at each vertex in the mesh.
  • Improvements have been made to increase the physical accuracy of radiance transfer simulations.

DXUT

Based on customer feedback, the following is a list of major differences and improvements to the DXUT framework:

• Callback functions now pass a void* pUserContext that allows the callback functions to receive context from the application.
• The framework's GUI is now separate and optional from the core framework.
• The framework now allows applications to reject device changes via LPDXUTCALLBACKMODIFYDEVICESETTINGS which returns a bool.
• Passing 0 as the width and height to DXUTCreateDevice now creates a backbuffer of the same size as the client window.
• DXUTGetExitCode now returns 11 if the last device was a D3DDEVTYPE_REF device type.

For more information about all of these features, see DXUT Reference.

Technical Article Updates

• The DirectX developer Frequenty Asked Questions (FAQs) page has been added to the documentation. See DirectX Frequently Asked Questions.
• A new technical article about the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 has been added. See Introduction to the 10-Foot Experience for Windows Game Developers.

See Also

What's New in the October 2006 DirectX SDK