\The ZMan at the PDC
9/25/05: Slides available.
You can download the slides from PDC Comnet (search for 'Direct 3D') or, since I have no idea how long they will stay there, from ZBuffer Downloads.
This will just be a quick summary of some of the points from the 2 DirectX talks they had at PDC. They were well attended - the first one had to have an overflow room.
- DirectX 10 is the name of the game, they didn't mention WGF once.
- Vista will ship with both DirectX 9 (which contains all the backward compatible stuff (dx8,7,6, direct draw etc) and DirectX10 which REQUIRES DX10 hardware (non exists yet) and will not be backward compatible.
- The DX9 implementation will run all the old programs with no code changes. This is quite amazing considering that in Vista programs have to share the graphics card with the OS.
- There will be some extensions to DX9 that you can take advantage of in Vista.
- If your graphics card is using the new Vista driver model then GDI/GDI+ has *NO* hardware acceleration. In practise this shouldn't be a big deal since the CPUs are so darn fast these days.
- No more managing the memory yourself and worrying about when to create things. Memory is now shared and the OS decides when to page things up to the graphics card.
- No more DeviceLost (Yay). In fact the only time you can lose the device is if someone pulls the card or the drivers get updated. Generally only things that long running apps (like VISTA) have to worry about. [and those of you wondering how you can unplug a card need to think about laptops that have an auxiliary graphics card in the docking station]
- Can't interleave GDI and DX on the same surface any more.
- DX10 supports some new pipeline features:
- Geometry Shader: Runs after the vertex shader. Has visibility to the entire data stream including adjacency etc. Can add or remove data from the stream meaning that you can create geometry on the fly. They had a cool demo of a particle system running totally on the GPU and a scene that had dynamically growing vines, also 100% on the GPU
- Input Streams: This is a way of piping data out of one stage and back into earlier stages next time though. Essential for these totally 100% on the GPU programs. The CPU never has to modify the data.
- Predicated Rendering: Based on a decision earlier in the shader pipeline you can decide not to do something later. The example they showed was to render the bounding box around a complex object and then check if the box was occluded. If it was then the complex mesh also must be occluded so it is never ever passed through the pipeline.
It was a dark (well not really - the power in LA was back on) Monday evening at the Coding4Fun booth in the PDC Exhibition hall. It was their destiny, the battle they both knew they would one day have to face.
In the red corner, running on Windows CE we have "THE FINALIZER"
In the blue corner, the hero of geeks everywhere, the newly head shaven (he assures me it makes him look tough) NINE GUY.
Of course we got the whole thing on video....
Come by the coding4fun booth in the exhibition hall and see THE FINALIZER and lots of other cool gadgets and robots.
If you want to meet up while at PDC, for a chat about Managed DirectX, quitting your job at Microsoft, game development or anything else then you can meet me at the Coding4Fun booth in the exhibition hall at the following times:
- Tuesday 13th: Most of the evening, or at least until the free beer runs out
- Wednesday 14th: After the keynote, until around 12:30am
- Thursday 15th: After the keynote, until around 11:30am then again during the evening
The badge of course doesn't say ZMan, it says Andrew Dunn which is of course my alter-ego!
Firstly thanks to all those who showed up. It was Monday evening so there are a lot of people not there yet, or who have recently just arrived. We still had 35 attendees. Sadly since the DirectX sessions are not until Thursday I was limited to what I could say about DirectX10. David was there to make sure I didn't violate any NDAs. I thought I was pretty cool wearing my GDC 05 t-shirt until it was pointed out to me that there was a big play station logo on the back.
There was some good discussion with the highlight being David announcing that the October SDK release will include a beta of the .Net 2.0 managed assemblies. No word what that will look like but you heard it first at the PDC.
You would think from the pictures on the website that the LA Athletic club is a real luxury pad. However, my phone doesn't appear to work - the voice mail light was on when I arrived but I can't get any messages. The flashing orange light was really annoying when I wanted to sleep. In addition, the previous occupant appears to have stolen the TV remote control and the alarm clock can only be set if you hold the button down with your entire body weight. Though there appears to be a wireless LAN available and you can connect to it though you can NEVER get a web site up which is why there was no blog entries last night. I was too tired to bitch. I have a horrible feeling its probably because they want to charge me for it. Seems like all the other hotels have free wireless, but not mine. $200 a night ($130 for the PDC) and they ding you for wireless too....
If you 'code your way to PDC' - you get a much nicer room
Well I'm here at PDC, after quite the annoying flight. When you get on a plane and there is a 4 month old baby behind you you know its going to be a fun 2.5 hours. However, the baby made noises for less than 5 minutes and I can forgive that because it's a baby after all. However the guy sitting next to them had a rather annoying, loud nasally monotonic voice and he told his life story to the guy across the aisle all the way there. Then there was the little girl in front of me with a personal DVD player - WITHOUT HEAPDHONES. Her mother of course slept the whole way (after reclining into my lap - come on lady its 2pm get your sleep before you fly) so was oblivious. So we all got to hear Shrek 2. After about 40 minutes I remembered I had my noise cancelling headphones which unfortunatly managed to kill just about all of that. Thanks goodness for technology.
More great PDC news. Benjamin Nitschke is coming to PDC. Benjamin has done something most of us have yet to do - he has completed several games. We will forgive him for using OpenGL in the first one since he seems to be well and truly into Managed DirectX these days :-)
Dirk Primbs will be there too. He's blogged on some 3d stuff in the past.
Benjamin/Dirk - hope to see you at the DirectX birds of a feather.
Great news from INETA this morning, my proposed session on DirectX has been accepted.
Monday, September 12, 2005 at 8:15 PM
Given that there are probably more managed programmers than native at PDC I think this is going to be a great event for those of us DirectX programmers who prefer to live without pointers :-).
I am delighted to inform you that your proposal, "DirectX - Graphics and Games", has been accepted as a Birds of a Feather session at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005 in Los Angeles, California.......
Your Birds of a Feather session is scheduled for Monday, September 12, 2005 at 8:15 PM........
We’ve heard the feedback loud and clear from previous conferences: a Birds of a Feather session is a discussion; it is not a presentation, lecture or breakout session. Projectors will not be available. Birds of a Feather sessions fill a niche in the conference – it is an opportunity for attendees to connect and interact directly with one another, to be part of their community.
Notice the description, its *NOT* a presentation so come prepared to meet other MDX folks and talk about things. Casey will be there and hopefully we can take a look at /cameraFlow and maybe even /cfWorldWind. Also Bonk from IRC #manageddx will there too.
Drop me an email if you will be attending the session - I would love to know what kinds of things you would like to discuss.
Voting has been extended but closes Sunday September 4th
My proposal for a Birds Of a Feather community session at PDC this year has been accepted. There's only slots for 7 sessions so I encourage those of you attending (you have to log in to vote) go and choose your 7 favourites, hopefully one of which will be mine.
DirectX - Graphics and Games
How does DirectX fit into the world of Windows Graphics Framework (Avalon) and Vista (Longhorn)? What about DirectX.Next? Can you really write games in managed code? Do you have a problem you need to ask about? Come and talk about the past, present and future of DirectX both managed and native.
Submitted By: Andy Dunn, TheZBuffer.com
Vote here (after logging in with your passport click BOF voting on the left hand menu)
BoF sessions are not about me talking, they are about groups of like minded community folks getting together and talking about things as a group. There's no agenda and everyone is encouraged to ask *and* answer. So I'd love to see some more knowledgable folks there too. My role will be to moderate and keep the discussion moving.
Normally the blog is 99% Managed DirectX, with the occasional random sidetrack when I'm in the mood. But with PDC coming up and me spending a whole bunch of money to go I am about to break that rule big time.
Well to be honest maybe big time is a little exaggeration, I aim to attend mostly the UI/graphic sessions and given that Avalon/WPF has lots of nice 3D I think there will be some relevance. Also I will be at the Coding4Fun booth/lounge some of the time which is everything to do with the 'Ask the ZMan' MSDN column. Rest assured there will be no Indigo or SQL on this blog.
However I understand that some of you don't give a damn, so I'm giving you several ways to opt out.
- If you read on the web you are screwed - sorry!
- If you use a blog reader and you don't want the PDC posts then change the RSS url to http://www.thezbuffer.com/rss-nopdc.aspx.
- If for some strange reason you only want PDC posts, then use http://www.thezbuffer.com/rss-pdc.aspx. This one is mainly set up so that I can register on PDC Bloggers and get read by BILLIONS of people.
So who's going to PDC this year. Just over 2 weeks to go. The ZMan bit the bullet and once again put his hand in his pocket. For once though I can go to the talks that interest *me*. In the past I had to cover all sorts of enterprise stuff. Now - well its the UI track (not that there is anything wrong with Indigo and its always worth going to see the Don Box show) all the way.
The Coding4Fun team will have a space somewhere and I will be in there area at some point during the 4 days. I will let you all know as soon as I know.
There's not much (any?) Managed DirectX stuff but there are a couple of sessions about the next version of DirectX from Meltdown - those should be worth attending.
Congratulations to Casey for winning a trip with an excellent program which uses Managed DirectX.
I will be staying at the LA Athletic club and I get in around 5pm on Monday 12th - so drop me an email if you want to hang out, drink beer etc etc
