DirectX 11

[CarlKenner]

What we really need to be pushing for is for DirectX 11 to include stereoscopic support.

Here are some arguments:

* OpenGL already has it: Currently if you want to develop a stereoscopic application you have to use OpenGL (or hack together 30 different stereo formats manually). It has glDrawBuffer() to render to left and right eyes seperately. The driver lets the user choose what sort of stereoscopic device to output to, but the application doesn't need to worry.

* There are too many stereo formats and stereoscopic devices. Without a standard API to render to them all, it is like the days of DOS where you have to understand the low level details of every hardware device yourself. The whole point of a library like DirectX is to avoid that.

* All modern graphics cards already have the necessary power to do stereoscopic rendering, so technologically it is a no-brainer for the hardware developer to support.

* Older versions of DirectDraw used to have stereoscopic support, because people fought for it. Unfortunately the hardware developers never supported it, but that won't be an issue for DirectX 11, because hardware developers are forced to support the complete feature set.

* Stereoscopic viewing has moved ahead in leaps and bounds recently. Movies are being made in stereoscopic 3D, and new stereoscopic monitors are being made for gaming, and being bought by large numbers of people.

* Some stereoscopic devices require signals on VGA pins for which eye to render, or simply alternating the view every vertical blank, but both can only be done at the graphics driver level. Which means it needs to be implemented in the graphics API.

* Nvidia had to hack together their own StereoBLT API to render to each eye by sending special magic codes in textures and writing a doublewidth texture to the back buffer. This abuse of the Direct3D API should not be the correct way of doing it.


So could Neil and his industry colleages please prepare some sort of submission to Microsoft regarding what features games need the DirectX API to have? I'm sure Microsoft must consult with industry groups, and other representatives about these things.

By the way, it doesn't have to be DirectX 11, it could just as easily be DirectX 10.2 or something like that. Actually a DirectX 9.1 would be very useful too. Not everyone has Vista and a DirectX 10 compatible card.

[yomer]

I second this request, Microsoft could include it in directX for native support.