What's New in the March 2008 DirectX SDK
This version of the DirectX SDK contains the following new features, tools, and documentation.
Direct3D 10.1 RTM
Direct3D 10.1 is an incremental, side-by-side update to Direct3D 10 that provides a series of new rendering features that will be available in an upcoming generation of graphics hardware.
* TextureCube Arrays which are dynamically indexable in shader code.
* An updated shader model (shader model 4.1).
* The ability to select the MSAA sample pattern for a resource from a palette of patterns, and retrieve the corresponding sample positions.
* The ability to render to block-compressed textures.
* More flexibility with respect to copying of resources.
* Support for blending on all unorm and unorm formats.
The DirectX SDK now contains the proper headers, libraries, debug binaries, and an updated version of the Direct3D 10 reference rasterizer to support development of Direct3D 10.1 applications. Direct3D 10.1 requires Windows Vista SP1, which is available to MSDN subscribers currently and publicly available on Windows Update in mid-March.
XAudio2 and XACT3 RTM
The libraries for XAudio2 and XACT3 are now supported release versions.
xWMA Decoding in XAudio2 and XACT3
Both XAudio2 and XACT3 now support xWMA> decoding in software on both Xbox 360 and Windows. xWMA uses the WMA bitstream format in a light-weight wrapper and can provide 1.5X the compression compared with XMA at similar quality. xWMA is very useful for types of content, such as dialog or music, for which you can afford a small CPU hit to achieve much greater compression. A quality setting similar to XMA's allows you to increase or decrease compression to adjust sound performance.
This SDK also includes WMAEncode, a command-line tool that allows you to create xWMA content for use in both XAudio2 and XACT3.
XACT3 Exposes a Filter On Every Track
XACT3 now exposes a filter on every track, letting the sound designer set the filter type and parameters (filter width and the cutoff/center frequency). The filter can be set directly on a track or it can be attached to an RPC. Sound designers can set either specific filter parameters, or they can specify a range, and a random value in that range will then be selected for the parameter each time the track is played.
PIX Stability Improvements
This release of PIX has improved stability when doing single-frame captures of Direct3D 10 applications. It also features improved reliability of shader debugging and pixel history.
Changes in Visual Studio Support
The March 2008 DirectX SDK includes support for Visual Studio 2008. The DirectX SDK continues to maintain support for Visual Studio 2005, but Visual Studio 2003 is no longer supported.
Games for Windows Technical Requirements and Test Requirements Updated
The Technical Requirements documents have been updated with additional clarifications and improved test cases. No Technical Requirements were changed.
New and Updated Samples
This release has several new samples. In addition, all audio samples that were using XACT and DirectSound have been updated to use XACT3 and XAudio2. All DirectSound samples have been removed.
* The PIX Game Debugging sample demonstrates common techniques for debugging games by using PIX for Windows.
* The ProceduralMaterials sample shows various procedural materials that are created through shaders.
* The SubD10 sample demonstrates Charles Loop's and Scott Schaefer's Approximate Catmull-Clark subdivision surface technique running on D3D10 hardware.
* The VideoMemory sample shows how to use various methods to determine the amount of video memory available on a
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