D3D8 Software Emulation?

Yep... Pluggable Software devices were going to be in, but theres still debate about whether to include them.

Having said that, any graphics card made after mid-1997 has 3D acceleration, even cards like Matrox Mystique and S3 ViRGE have accelerated 3D. Laptops are a strange exception, but most made since 1999 have some level of support.

The other thing with DX8 is that you must have at least DirectX 6 level drivers for your graphics card or D3D8 won''t recognise it.

Finally, pretty soon its going to become Windows98 or above only which supports DX.

You can still use the DirectX 7 interfaces with ancient hardware, even with DX8 installed, thats not a problem.

The issue is how much legacy hardware they should have to build support into the API for - if the 90% of people playing modern 3D games (the only reason you''d use D3D8 over DX7) on up to date hardware (1998+), then why make the API slower with fallback code for the 10% of people with outdated hardware?!


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Simon O''''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

ok, I see the point for not including the software emulation now. It would slow down the API overall...But, one thing I don''t like with D3D8 is that since there is no software emulation at all, if there is any feature used in a certain program that the 3D card does not support, the entire program does not work! I think this is a problem that should be fixed in a future version, since not very many of even the newest 3d cards out there support the full feature set of D3D8. Maybe having two types of devices (HAL and RGB) slowed down the API a lot, but I think that they should still include software emulation for at least part of the feature set, that way the user will have to have at least some form of 3d card and still be able to run the programs.

This is totally backward thinking.

It''s the responsibility of the developer to include fallback support for features that don''t work on the card it''s being run on.

Otherwise, developers could just create a bunch of stuff that comes out tomorrow, that uses shaders, and can''t run on anything else. So everyone that wants to run that kickass game has to buy a brand spanky new vid card. This is of course ridiculous, which is why developers allow their cool features to be ''turned off''...

G''luck,
-Alamar

I know that features like that can be turned off in the game. But, I geuss I just like the thought that if I wanted to turn on those features to see what kind of a visual difference they made, then I would be able to. The processor can carry so much weight in the program too, especially a fast one!