Direct3D Initialization - Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 - page 45

The following example illustrates this. Suppose we wish to check if
a hardware device is capable of doing vertex processing in hardware (or
in other words, whether the device supports transformation and light-
ing calculations in hardware). By looking up the D3DCAPS9 structure in
the SDK documentation, we find that the bit D3DDEVCAPS_HWTRANS-
FORMANDLIGHT in the data member D3DCAPS9::DevCaps indicates
whether the device supports transformation and lighting calculations in
hardware. Our test then, assuming caps is a D3DCAPS9 instance and
has already been initialized, is:
bool supportsHardwareVertexProcessing;

// If the bit is “on” then that implies the hardware device
// supports it.
if( caps.DevCaps & D3DDEVCAPS_HWTRANSFORMANDLIGHT )
{

// Yes, the bit is on, so it is supported.
supportsHardwareVertexProcessing = true;

}
else
{

// No, the bit is off, so it is not supported.
hardwareSupportsVertexProcessing = false;

}

Note:

DevCaps stands for “device capabilities.”

Note: We learn how we initialize a D3DCAPS9 instance based on a
particular hardware device's capabilities in the next section.

Note: We recommend that you look up the D3DCAPS9 structure in
the SDK documentation and examine the complete list of capabilities
that Direct3D exposes.

1.4 Initializing Direct3D

The following subsections show how to initialize Direct3D. The pro-
cess of initializing Direct3D can be broken down into the following
steps:
1. Acquire a pointer to an IDirect3D9 interface. This interface is

used for finding out information about the physical hardware
devices on a system and creating the IDirect3DDevice9 inter-
face, which is our C++ object that represents the physical
hardware device we use for displaying 3D graphics.

2. Check the device capabilities ( D3DCAPS9 ) to see if the primary dis-

play adapter (primary graphics card) supports hardware vertex