The IDirect3DDevice3 interface provides methods enabling applications to perform DrawPrimitive-based rendering; this is in contrast to the IDirect3DDevice interface, which applications use to work with execute buffers. You can create a Direct3DDevice object and retrieve a pointer to this interface by calling the IDirect3D3::CreateDevice method.
For a conceptual overview, see Direct3D Devices and The DrawPrimitive Methods.
The methods of the IDirect3DDevice3 interface can be organized into the following groups:
The IDirect3DDevice3 interface, like all COM interfaces, inherits the IUnknown interface methods. The IUnknown interface supports the following three methods:
| IUnknown | AddRef |
| QueryInterface | |
| Release |
This interface extends the IDirect3DDevice2 interface by adding methods to support more flexible vertex formats, vertex buffers, and visibility computation. Note that all of the viewport-related methods in this interface accept slightly different parameters than their counterparts in the IDirect3DDevice2 interface. Wherever an IDirect3DDevice2 interface method might accept an IDirect3DViewport2 interface pointer as a parameter, the methods in the IDirect3DDevice3 interface accept an IDirect3DViewport3 interface pointer instead.
This interface is not intended to be used with execute buffers, and therefore does not contain any execute-buffer related methods. If you need to use some of the methods in the IDirect3DDevice interface that are not supported in IDirect3DDevice2 or IDirect3DDevice3, you can call IDirect3DDevice2::QueryInterface to retrieve a pointer to an IDirect3DDevice interface.
You can use the LPDIRECT3DDEVICE2 or LPDIRECT3DDEVICE3 data types to declare a variable that contains a pointer to an IDirect3DDevice2 or IDirect3DDevice3 interface. The D3d.h header file declares these data types with the following code:
typedef struct IDirect3DDevice2 *LPDIRECT3DDEVICE2;
typedef struct IDirect3DDevice3 *LPDIRECT3DDEVICE3;
Windows NT/2000: Requires Windows 2000.
Windows 95/98: Requires Windows 95 or later. Available as a redistributable for Windows 95.
Header: Declared in d3d.h.
Import Library: Use ddraw.lib.