Microsoft® Direct3D® 8.x supports paletted textures through a set of 256 entry palettes associated with the IDirect3DDevice8 object. A palette is made current by calling the IDirect3DDevice8::SetCurrentTexturePalette method. The current palette is used for translating all paletted textures for all active texture stages. IDirect3DDevice8::SetPaletteEntries updates all of a palette's 256 entries. Each entry is a PALETTEENTRY structure of the format D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8. All entries default to 0xFFFFFFFF.

The IDirect3DDevice8 palettes contain an alpha channel. This alpha channel can be used when the D3DPTEXTURECAPS_ALPHAPALETTE device capability flag is set, indicating that the device supports alpha from the palette. The palette alpha channel is used when the texture format does not have an alpha channel. If the device does not support alpha from the palette and the texture format does not have an alpha channel, then a value of 0xFF is used for alpha.