Tonight's moon and bright, watching the swinging branches, seeing extra attractive. NVIDIA's NV30 is finally born. Although she is late, she did not let us down, it is called the fastest display card in the world, and the hardware indicators far exceeds the opponent Radeon 9700PRO. The throne of the king of the DirectX9 era is finally rushed back by NVIDIA. However, do you know that NV30 is not a full-meaning DirectX9 graphics card. Who is the real DirectX9 display card? What is DirectX9? Is it really important, really so authority?
DirectX
What is it? DirectX is a graphics application interface (API), simply it is an auxiliary software, an acceleration software that improves system performance, Microsoft created development. His meaning is not difficult to understand, Direct is direct meaning, X is a lot of things, adding together is a group of common things, this commonality is directly. Microsoft defines it for "hardware device independence".
DirectX consists of four parts, sound portions, input portions, and network parts.
The display section is divided into Direct Draw (DDRAW) and Direct 3D (D3D) mainly responsible for 2D acceleration. It includes many aspects: we use the DDRAW for playing MPG, DVD movies, playing thunder, and mahjong three, you can understand it into all lines of DDRAW, due to display card 2D Performance has basically reached the limit, many graphics cards are very good, people have always put the focus on the back D3D. The latter is responsible for 3D acceleration, such as the body of the Need for Speed 3-6 and the smoke, the scenes and characters in CS, the ancient tomb Raise, except for the classic game quake3, it uses another API interface - OpenGL. The sound portion includes sound efficiency and MIDI music, and the effect of different sound card performance is different. The current sound card basically supports DirectSound. But the best sound effects mainly include EXA and A3D, if your sound card supports these two effects, you integrate into the real 3D game world. If the sound card supports a better wavefront, it will have a good performance through DirectX's Direct Music. Enter the section: Direct Input not only supports more game input devices, but also more detailed and drivers for these devices, give full play to the optimal state and full functionality of the device. In addition to the keyboard and mouse, you can connect the handle, a rocker, a simulator, and the like. Network section: Directplay, it comes to the game. Through it allows both interconnection between the computer, there is a variety of connection, TPC / IP, IPX, Modem, serial port, and more.
DirectX 8 stunt (PS and VS)
DirectX
Social background when you are birth. A long time ago, Windows95 has just been born, and the Win95 magical graphical interface made many people invested Microsoft. Before Win95 was born, the 3D acceleration card market was confusing, there were many vendors, and they have their own 3D technical standards, and they are not compatible with each other. At that time, the game makers were also very headache. In order to take care of the overall situation, they need to achieve better results for different display chip vendors, and a game to make a game that supports different display cards. For example, when a biochemical crisis, incoming, Fortest, Dinosaur Hunter have just come out, there are many main programs, ATI's, S3, Voodoo, etc. Just at this time, Win95 appeared, and with Win95, DirectX1.0 also came to the world.
DirectX
For the game - Direct X 1.0
come out. Microsoft likes to establish standards, and DirectX has made an indelible contribution to computer multimedia. After the DirectX standard, the card chip manufacturer, sound card chip manufacturer, keyboard, mouse, rocker manufacturer, network card manufacturer, etc. have to be improved in accordance with this standard. This is meaningful to do anything, Microsoft has developed a DirectX standard platform, and cooperates with hardware manufacturers and gaming vendors to jointly update the upgrade DirectX standard. Hardware manufacturers have developed better products in accordance with this standard, and the game programmer develops games according to this standard. That is, regardless of whether the hardware supports a special effect, as long as the DirectX standard, the programmer written by the game can write it to the game, when this game is running on the hardware, if this hardware makes this effect according to DirectX standard In this hardware driver, the driver can control its hardware to calculate this effect, users can enjoy this effect. This is the "hardware device independence", is the true meaning of Direct.
However, DirectX has been in many aspects after I'm coming. The main enemies are OpenGL, there is a very mature standard (interface) OpenGL at the time of the display card, mainly used in graphics, video servers, production movies, subjects, etc., as technology matology, more and more popular, this is DirectX's natural enemy. Plus the DirectX standard has just been launched, many hardware does not support, many mainstream games are not supported, no games, no hardware, even if there is a good standard, it is meaningless, DirectX's charm has not been behaved.
Direct X 2.0
-- 2
The rise of the victory. After all aspects, DirectX upgrade to 2.0, this time the iconic product is born. 2.0 The biggest improvement is in Direct Draw, 2D. At this time, two games have been born - Red Depalert and Diable (fear), the red police Windows version and Diable are developed on DirectX standards. Unfortunately, many old graphics cards cannot fully support DirectX2.0, and cannot play Diable. Except for 2D, the prototype of D3D portion of DirectX2.0 is basically completed, and because there are fewer 3D games, many are developed based on DOS. The PC version of Sega's VR warrior is based on DirectX2.0 development, although the effect is rough, Direct 3D initial effects can be seen.
Direct X3.0
-D3D
Stand up. In 97, Microsoft released DirectX 3.0. This version really is really letting DirectX stand up, let D3D have the courage to fight with OpenGL. It is precisely because of this version, many people know that there is DirectX so Dongdong, and it can also come out of 3D effect under Windows 95. At this time, the first generation of 3D display cards in the true sense have appeared. For example: 3DFX Voodoo, NVIDIA RivA128, Intel's I740. There are more and more 3D games at this time. The 3D application interface has formed 3 points. They are a professional OpenGL interface, Microsoft's D3D interface and 3DFX GLIDE interface. 3DFX Glide is the most fierce, the game programmer uses it to easily complicate, vivid 3D effect, 3DFX Voodoo sells worldwide, and later 3DFX was acquired by NVIDIA.
DirectX 5.0 - Let D3D are more powerful. It may be that the United States also taboo "4" word, there is no long after DirectX3.0, it supports skip 4.0 released DirectX5.0.5.0 and 3.0 time interval is not long, but his meaning is not simple. The D3D effect of DirectX5 can be divided into autumn autumn. Introduced the homogenization support, so that 3D games are really feeling. In addition, there is a great improvement in the compatibility of the game system. DirectX 6
- completely defeat 3DFX
Glide
. In short-generation 3D display cards in DirectX5.0, this generation of 3D display cards will not be available with DirectX6.0 technology. This generation of display cards mainly include: NVIDIA's RIVA TNT, parallel voodoo2, voodoo3. At this time, the market pattern is already very clear, it is the struggle of NVIDIA and 3DFX. The 3D effect of DirectX 6 is more, and the powerful performance of hardware can render the 32-bit color 3D effect at high resolution. This uses the Voodoo series of PCI bus technology to defeat, it can only support 800x600 The 16-bit color rendering, although his 800x600x16 is better than 1024x768x32, but is not recognized. NVIDIA is very good in this regard, using advanced AGP bus structure, high indicators, strict requirements, every time I release new products, give users more performance, each success, the foundation of the graphics boss .
Second War caused by DirectX 7 - T & L Engine. DirectX7 has once again reintegrate the graphics market, and DirectX7 is the largest feature is to support T & L, Chinese name is "coordinate conversion and light source". This feature is a key role in displaying the Card GPU and the CPU. Any object in the 3D game has a coordinate. When this object moves, its coordinates change, which refers to coordinate conversion; in addition to scene objects in 3D games, there is no lighting, there is no 3D object. Whether it is a real-time 3D game or a 3D image rendering, the 3D rendering of the light is the most resource. Prior to T & L came, location conversion and lighting need CPU to calculate, the faster CPU speed, the more smooth game performance. After using the T & L function, the two effects calculate the GPU of the display card (which can be understood as the CPU of the display card), so that the CPU will be freed from busy labor, let CPU do what he should do. For example, logical operations, data calculations, etc. In other words, there is a T & L display card, using DirectX7, even if there is no high-speed CPU, you can also run 3D games smoothly. T & L became the focus of concern at the time. The first display card that supports T & L function is NVIDIA's GeForce 256.
Transition: You compete for me. Subsequent GeForce 2 can basically be said to be a speed version of GeForce 256, except for a lot of speed, there is no big effect improvement. At this time, ATI's Radeon is released, once the best display card that supports T & L function. Of course, these two display cards belong to the DirectX7 display card.
NVIDIA has just ended the war with 3DFX for approaching for 3 years by acquisition, but the competition is everywhere, this is not ATI and NVIDIA. It has been hitting it now.
- DirectX 8 -
- DirectX 7 -
DirectX8.0 PS and VS let us wait for DirectX8 released last year, and a helpless war begins. DirectX8 is really a good thing, it has not been released, and the world's well-known graphics card test software manufacturer released 3DMark2001 in April 2001, supporting all special effects of DirectX8. It is helpless that most of the graphics cards at that time can not complete all the tests of this software, and 4 scenes run out. The reason is that DirectX8 integrates two major tricks -VS (Vertex Shader) and PS (Pixel Shading). Through the rendering of VS and PS, it is easy to nourish the real water-surface dynamic corrugated light. However, the two effects filtered a large number of mainstream graphics cards, the first block supports DirectX8's display card is NVIDIA's GeForce 3, the real 4th generation 3D accelerator card is coming, that is, fully support DirectX8.0 The display card can be called the 4th generation 3D acceleration card. Since DirectX8 has been admitted earlier, many display card manufacturers have not been equal, and the ATI's 8500 has been released for half a year, and SIS's Xavre is released for half a year. Helpless is not only hardware manufacturers, but also the game manufacturers are not good, because the market mainstream is Direct7 display card, they have to move, otherwise develop a game that fully supports DirectX8, no hardware support, it is dead. Today is the era of DirectX. Supporting DirectX8 display cards have spread with the latest games to optimize DirectX8. I believe that DirectX8's graphics card game is your best choice before the release of DirectX9 next year. - DirectX 9 -
- DirectX 8 -
DirectX9.0 looks forward to it. If you say it, you can't say DirectX9. At present, it has reached the formal test phase, the latest test version is RC0, and the prediction is the first quarter of 2003. So far, the development process of DirectX9 has made us very satisfied, and its conservative action is to increase PS and VS to version 2.0 (it will be raised to 3.0 when publishing). PS means that pixel rendering effects, the meaning of VS is the vertex rendering effect. To put it bluntly PS and VS, it is more easier to make the game program designer to create more beautiful results. Since the new generation of graphics card's Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader have further improved, many programming obstacles will disappear. Let's introduce several new features of DirectX9. First, DirectX9.0's PS 2.0 has a fully programmable Pixel Shading architecture. Also, DirectX 9.0 VS 2.0 has significantly improved the VS performance of the old version (DirectX8) by increasing the flexibility of the Vertex program. More importantly: DirectX 9.0 supports high precision floating point colors. He broke through the previously restricted PC graphic image quality in mathematical precision, and each rendering pipeline was upgraded to 128-bit floating point colors.
To make full use of DirectX9's new features, NVIDIA has launched a set of languages for 3D programming - CG developer tool kits. It is said that it can be programmed directly to DirectX9 through this language. We will see more real scenes and more realistic people. With the above three characteristics, not only the 3D game programmer is more efficient, but more importantly, people can make people appointing the film rendering level.
DirectX 9 stunt (PS and VS)
It can be seen from the NV30 that has just been released, NV30 supports more PS and VS to achieve a better purpose of supporting DirectX9. NVIDIA's NV30 and ATI's R300 come to DirectX9. From their specifications, it has reached an unimaginable point, and the level is far from the back of the Moore's law, it seems that the significance of this competition is not very unusual. . Monster Power Company Mao monsted the soft fluffy, the final fantasy movie, the female protagonist's facial skin, timely and delicate dynamic shadow, will appear in the DirectX9 era. The combination of this era is based on DirectX9, represents NV30 and R300 as hardware representatives, with DOOM3 as a game representative, let us experience the advent of the new era. On the official website of NVIDIA, you can see the NV30 support a large number of new games with DirectX9 standards, respectively: Unreal II, Command & Conqueerals, Sea Dogs II, Splinter Cell, Rallisport Challenge. In addition, DirectX9 is NV30 and R300. Come, before the previous display card can still be installed, after all, is the next generation of standards, the future acceleration software is advanced.
DirectX version iconic technology iconic hardware iconic effect iconic game 1.0 - - - 2.0 D2D Mature Trident 9680, S3 2D Dynamic Effect Red Alert, Diable 3.0 D3D Total RiVA128, I740 Simple 3D Effect Motorcycle British, best Speed 3 5.0 Basic 3D Technology Riva TNT Atomization, Araf Mixed Tomb Raider 3 6.0 Mature 3D Technology TNT, TNT 2 Double / Three-Line Filter Need for Speed 5, CS 7.0 T & L GeForce 256, Radeon Confuciosity Motorcycle 3, Diable 2 8.0 PS, VS Geforse 3, Radeon8500 Water Water Water Wash 3dmark2001, Warcraft 3 8.1 PS, VS Upgrade Geforce 4, Radeon9700 Globe Water Water Water Terrier Need for Speed 6 9.0 High Version PS, VS NV30, R300 Florife Effect DOOM3
Tips: View the version number of the DirectX of the current system: Click: Start - Run - Type "DXDiag" to adjust the DirectX's diagnostics to understand the DirectX.
