Index: Requirements
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Software Research
- 3D interface for DirectX.
- Home page: http://198.105.232.6:80/imedia/direct3d/direct3d.htm
- Accelerator support, integrated with DirectX
and Active Movie.
- Supports drivers for hardware 3D accellerators, and also provides
a good software 3D renderer in the hardware emulation layer.
- Has a low level "immediate mode" as well as a high level
"retained mode".
- The immediate mode uses an instruction set that you assemble together
with 3D data into buffers, that you can execute.
- The retained mode uses nested 3D transformation frames, objects, and
lights. It is actually the Reality Labs RenderMorphics
renderer, hidden behind a COM interface.
- Will eventually support the Open GL renderer
(which is already part of Win32). It's interesting
to compare the two renderers.
- The Direct3D Retained mode is really pretty impressivly fast on my
90MHZ Pentium ThinkPad with no hardware acceleration! It does texture mapping
quite nicely.