I'm just curious, in DX if your card doesn't have vertexarrays, does/can DX emulate them automatically? Certainly, writing the emulation for everything isn't to anyone's liking. I thought both DX and OGL can automatically emulate everything up to (but excluding) vertex/pixel shaders.
Posted on 2005-11-08 07:52:04 by Ultrano
As far as I have seen, it's against the DirectX spirit to emulate stuff; some emulation would drop your fps to unacceptable levels anyway, so it's better not to do it. I'm not too fond of the way OpenGL allows you to write suboptimal code and still have it execute at decent speeds... :)
Posted on 2005-11-08 09:03:48 by f0dder
AFAIK DirectX9 emulates everything except Pixel Shaders. Of course some stuff is very slow, but there are things almost as fast as the hardware.

"Software D3D" is optimized for Intel and AMD (MMX/3dNow/probably SSE) what makes DX better than OpenGL IMHO  :mrgreen:
Posted on 2005-11-09 03:17:19 by ti_mo_n
Thanks, that's what I wanted to hear, ti_mo_n ^^
Posted on 2005-11-09 07:08:41 by Ultrano
Thank you for the reply homer, i know you have been busy lately (didn't login for quite some time).

I'm seriously considering switching from OpenGL to D3D at the moment, I've borrowed a book about D3D in which I'm starting now.

Scorpie
Posted on 2005-11-09 12:43:09 by Scorpie
There's a great book "Programming games with DirectX" (NOT the "programming game effects with DirectX") by Mason McCuskey, but (strange :| ) I can't find it in English (mine is localized). It goes through all the DX, but 75% of the book is D3D from initialization, through 2d-buffer effects, 3d effects, special visual effects (water interference, fluids, fire, explosions, etc.), to advanced effects using pixel shaders. Everything with thoroughly comented samples. The CD includes samples, textures, as well as few gfx programs.
Posted on 2005-11-09 18:31:09 by ti_mo_n