loading a texture from file

Read this, particularly where width and height are concerned.

Basically, yes, DX will stretch your image to a power of 2 unless you tell it otherwise.

Hope that helps.

[Edit]: Typo.

D3DX will pad a texture so that it's a power of 2 width and height. You can use GetLevelDesc() on the first level of the texture to find out what size D3DX created the texture as, and if you use the Ex versions of D3DXCreateTextureFrom[...]() you can get it to tell you the size of the image in the file. Using that information, you can set your texture coordinates up so that the image isn't stretched.

I'd recommend using power of two image dimensions unless you have a good reason, since it's sometimes more efficient, and will allow you to target lower end hardware (Older cards can't do non-power-of-two textures).
If you really need non-power-of-2 textures, then make sure you check your caps to check the card can support them (Or gracefully handle errors fom creating textures at least), then you can create the texture manually with IDirect3DDevice9::CreateTexture(), then D3DXLoadSurfaceFrom[..][Ex] to load the file into each mip level of the texture. specify D3DX_DEFAULT_NONPOW2 for the width and height.

This is all assuming C++, unmanaged DX, but it should be similar for other languages.

EDIT: FOrgot about D3DX_DEFAULT_NONPOW2...

Hi,

try this...

Load your texture (tx)....

and get desc surface.

D3DSURFACE_DESC surfDesc;
tx->GetTextureDev()->GetLevelDesc(0, &surfDesc);

float left = xpos;
float top = ypos;
float right = left + surfDesc.Width; // - 1;
float bottom = top + surfDesc.Height; // - 1;

and.... set vertex positions...

Verts[0].posiz = D3DXVECTOR2(left,top);
Verts[1].posiz = D3DXVECTOR2(right,top);
Verts[2].posiz = D3DXVECTOR2(right,bottom);
Verts[3].posiz = D3DXVECTOR2(left,bottom);

bye.
Luca