3D Programming: The first chapter introducing DirectX

DirectX is a collection of APIs for developing game or graphics-related applications on the Microsoft platform, including Windows,windows Phone,xbox 360, and Xbox one. DirectX from the 1990 's medium-term development so far, and is now in the forefront of graphic development. Direct3D is a set of 3D graphics APIs within DirectX, which is the main story of this book. DirectX also includes system support for 2D graphics, input, audio, text rendering, and GPU programming. This chapter outlines the graphical pipelines for DirectX and DirectX 11.

Review history

The DirectX 1.0 version was released in September 1995, just after Windows95 was released. Previous games were developed primarily in MS-DOS environments. The release of DirectX is Microsoft's attempt to get game developers to move to the new operating system. Few of the early users of DirectX moved to the new platform, which was exacerbated by the rapid release of the DirectX Library. In February 2000, Microsoft has developed 6 additional major versions of DirectX, along with a large number of minor modifications. But the DirectX library has been steadily improved, so in 2001 Microsoft released its first game host, supporting DirectX 8 revisions. At the same time, DirectX has won the support of a large number of developers, Microsoft has become a leader in the field of game and graphics.         at the same time, 3D graphics hardware is in a similar fast-growing state. Until the middle of the 1990, Low-cost, consumer-facing 3D graphics hardware did not exist at all. The early 3D graphics cards provided only fixed-function apis-features that are only specific to a particular video card cannot be changed or extended by a graphical developer. With the release of the 2001 Xbox,nvidia GeForce 3,directx 8, developers were widely introduced to programmable shaders for the first time. Programmable shaders allows developers to manipulate a 3D object, using a GPU (also known as a video card) to compute output in pixels of one pixel. When DirectX 8, shaders was written in assembly language, but by 2002, with the release of DirectX 9, Microsoft introduced high-level Shading Language (HLSL), A C-style programming language for writing shaders.         November 2005, Microsoft launched its Xbox 360 and guaranteed that it lasted until November 2013, the longest host service cycle since the launch of the game host. The Xbox 360 uses DirectX 9. A year later, in November 2006, Microsoft released Windows Vista and DirectX 10. During this time, however, the game hosts occupied the video game market, and the Xbox 360 only supported DirectX 9. As a result, few developers use DirectX 10, and developers who use DirectX 10 are also limited by the DirectX 10 feature of the PC platform. Other factors that inhibit DirectX  10 being used on a large scale are significant changes between DirectX9 and DirectX10, and Windows Vista is only made by a fewUse. Windows 7 was launched in 2009, and DirectX 11 was released very soon. The release was a small change relative to DirectX 10 (relatively small changes compared to early-updating iterations). DirectX 11 introduces DirectCompute, universal GPU programming api,tessellation support, and improved multithreading. During this time, the PC platform gaming market began to recover and became popular, partly because of the stream digital distribution platform like Valve, and partly because the game host was already out of date. These factors are causing more and more developers to start using DirectX 11. Then in the fall of 2012, Microsoft released Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, as well as DirectX 11.1. This is also an important version of the book, and Microsoft has recently supported most of its platforms, including the latest Xbox One.         is just a book about DirectX, but if I don't mention OpenGL (the very competitive graphics library of the same period), I'm going to think I'm not responsible. OpenGL is a Cross-platform rendering API that Silicon Graphics Inc. (inc.) released in 1991. When the book was written, the latest version of OpenGL was 4.4 (released in July 2013) and managed by Kronos Group. Only OpenGL and DirectX differ significantly in their design architecture, but they now support the same rendering capabilities. Therefore, how to choose DirectX or OpenGL is a big problem for the platform. DirectX is mainly for Microsoft platform, because of the broad support of graphics card manufacturers, Microsoft's Windows operating system has become the dominant desktop computer. And OpenGL, not for a feature platform, is widely used in the field of mobile development. At this point, after reviewing history, we began to learn the following content.

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