IDirect3DRMDevice, IDirect3DRMDevice2, and IDirect3DRMDeviceArray Interfaces
All forms of rendered output must be associated with an output device. The device object represents the visual display destination for the renderer.
The renderer's behavior depends on the type of output device that is specified. You can define multiple viewports on a device, allowing different aspects of the scene to be viewed simultaneously. You can also specify any number of devices, allowing multiple destination devices for the same scene.
Retained Mode supports devices that render directly to the screen, to windows, or into application memory.
While an IDirect3DRMDevice interface, when created from the IDirect3DRM interface, works with an IDirect3DDevice Immediate-Mode device, an IDirect3DRMDevice2 interface, when created from the IDirect3DRM2 interface or initialized by the IDirect3DRMDevice2::InitFromClipper, IDirect3DRMDevice2::InitFromD3D2, or IDirect3DRMDevice2::InitFromSurface method, works with an IDirect3DDevice2 Immediate-Mode device. The IDirect3DDevice2 device supports the DrawPrimitive interface as well as execute buffers, and is required for progressive meshes and for alpha blending and sorting of transparent objects.
The IDirect3DRMDevice2::InitFromClipper and IDirect3DRMDevice2::InitFromSurface methods use the IDirect3DRM2::CreateDevice method to create an IDirect3DRMDevice2 object. The IDirect3DRMDevice2::InitFromD3D2 method uses an IDirect3D2 Immediate-Mode object and an IDirect3DDevice2 Immediate-Mode device to initialize an IDirect3DDevice2 Retained-Mode device.
You can still query back and forth between the IDirect3DRMDevice and IDirect3DRMDevice2 interfaces. The main difference is in how the underlying Immediate-Mode device is created.
The IDirect3DRMDevice2 interface contains all the methods found in the IDirect3DRMDevice interface, plus two additional ones that allow you to control transparency, IDirect3DRMDevice2::GetRenderMode and IDirect3DRMDevice2::SetRenderMode, and one additional initialization method IDirect3DRMDevice2::InitFromSurface.
For related information, see IDirect3DRMDevice and IDirect3DRMDevice2.
This section describes the options available to display Direct3D images to output devices.