What's New in the February 2005 DirectX SDK

This page is a record of the features that were added in the DirectX February 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:

Performance Tool Updates

Enhancements to PIX have been made:

• You can now capture the Direct3D calls made by a single frame of your application and play them back within PIX.
• When grabbing screen shots:
  • You can append an incrementing number, or the current frame number, to the screen shot filename.
  • You can specify whether to overwrite existing image files with the same filename.
  • You can specify whether to show or hide the mouse cursor in the screen shot.
• New command-line options are available to:
  • Convert a .PIXRun file to a .csv format that can be read by Microsoft Excel.
  • Save an exclusive-or comparison of two images to a file.

See Command-Line Syntax.

Graphics Updates

The following features have been updated in the graphics component:

• D3DX
• New Samples

D3DX

The following new features were added to D3DX:

• D3DX Is Now a Dynamic-Link Library - Starting with this software development kit (SDK) release, D3DX is being released as a dynamic-link library (DLL). Updates to D3DX in the future will continue to ship as uniquely-named DLLs that exist side-by-side on the system. This allows for continued improvements to the library without imposing regression risk. D3DX9.lib is still provided as the import library for the DLL for your application to statically link against.

  The D3DX DLL included in the SDK is automatically installed as part of Installing DirectX with DirectSetup. If your application does not use D3DX, you can remove D3DX from the redistributable (see Directx redist.txt for details). The statically-linked debug library (D3DX9dt.lib) has been removed; use D3DX9d.lib instead. For more information, see D3DX.

• DirectX Standard Annotations and Semantics - Standard annotations and semantics (DXSAS) define a contract between an effect and a host application, that enables shaders to share metadata with tools, applications, and game engines. The DXSAS standard defines a set of semantics and annotations that must be implemented in both host applications and effects. This release documents version 1.0.0 of the DXSAS standard. See DirectX Standard Annotations and Semantics Reference.
• Effects - A new effect function (D3DXCreateEffectEx) was added that allows an application to control which parameters can be updated by the application; that is, ignored by the effects system. Add each constant to a string that is supplied to the function. Each constant must be bound to a constant register, and may only be used in high-level shader language (HLSL) code. Companion functions for creating an effect from a file (D3DXCreateEffectFromFileEx) or a resource (D3DXCreateEffectFromResourceEx) were also added.
• Precomputed Radiance Transfer - The precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) application programming interface (API) has been enhanced. Rapid ray-tracing methods ID3DXPRTEngine::ShadowRayIntersects and ID3DXPRTEngine::ClosestRayIntersects are provided to determine whether a point is in shadow.

New Samples

The following sample was added:

• PRTCmdLine - This sample uses a NULL reference Microsoft Direct3D device and an Extensible Markup Language (XML) options file to run the PRT simulator. See the sample in the sample browser.

Technical Article Updates

The following articles have changed:

• Updated Install-on-Demand for Games and Gaming with Least-Privileged User Accounts with information about patching.
• Top Issues for Windows Titles is a new article.

See Also

What's New in the October 2006 DirectX SDK