Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Getting Started with
Direct3D
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
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Components of Direct3D
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Stages of the programmable pipeline
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Introducing Direct3D 11.1 and 11.2
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Building a Direct3D 11 application with C# and SharpDX
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Initializing a Direct3D 11.1/11.2 device and swap chain
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Debugging your Direct3D application
Introduction
Direct3D is the component of the DirectX API dedicated to exposing 3D graphics hardware to
programmers on Microsoft platforms including PC, console, and mobile devices. It is a native
API allowing you to create not only 3D graphics for games, scientific and general applications,
but also to utilize the underlying hardware for General-purpose computing on graphics
processing units (GPGPU).
Programming with Direct3D can be a daunting task, and although the differences between
the unmanaged C++ API and the managed .NET SharpDX API (from now on referred to as the
unmanaged and managed APIs respectively) are subtle, we will briefly highlight some of these
while also gaining an understanding of the graphics pipeline.
We will then learn how to get started with programming for Direct3D using C# and SharpDX
along with some useful debugging techniques.