MIG-31

While the next major revision for DirectX is not expected until Longhorn’s launch, Microsoft’s DirectX group has been briefing developers on what’s in store for “DirectX Next” with presentations at Microsoft Meltdown and other developer conferences. Recently Microsoft have been dishing out to developers the directions that "DirectX Next" may take at Microsoft’s Meldown conference. The presentations given to developers have recently been made available and Beyond3D has taken a good look at the types of features and functionality that may be available in the next major update to DirectX.

This presentation was made available to the public via Microsoft’s Developer Network. The intent of this article is to give a more thorough treatment of the features listed for inclusion with DirectX Next and hence explore the types of capabilities that DirectX Next may be offering.

download slideshow: DirectX Slides from Meltdown 2003

View: DirectX Next Early Preview

news source: iexbeta

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BWX

Interesting article. It sounds like some pretty major changes are needed in the hardware to run DXnext. At least they are working on speed and using common sense though.

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HawK

Yes very interesting especially this part:
"In fact, many of the major DirectX Next changes seem to be a perfect fit for tile-based deferred renderers. The new memory management model, which allows virtually unlimited resources, also allows the implementation of virtually unlimited geometry storage, which has always been a concern for the deferred rendering implementations. Access to current frame buffer values from the pixel shader is also very easy to do on a tile-based deferred renderer since all the data is already in the on-chip tile buffer. So there are no costly external memory accesses required or expensive pipeline and back-end cache flushes. The front-end changes to the vertex/geometry shader side are independent of the tile-based deferred rendering principle and are thus not as big of a problem to support on tile-based deferred renderers as they are for immediate mode renderers. It will indeed be very interesting to see whether PowerVR, who has been laying pretty low lately, will take this opportunity to put out a really awesome DirectX Next implementation."
PowerVR Go!!!