Applications should always query for device capabilities to determine which features are supported.īecause the behavior of the software and reference devices provided with Direct3D 9 is identical to that of the hal device, application code authored to work with the hal device will work with the software or reference devices without modifications. With the exception of the reference device, software devices do not always support the same features as a hardware device. In most cases, applications target computers that have hardware acceleration and rely on software emulation to accommodate lower-end computers.

The hal device type is available on all Direct3D supported graphic adapters. Hardware-accelerated devices give much better performance than software devices. Therefore, Direct3D provides devices for both hardware access and software emulation. Direct3D provides rendering capabilities, either by accessing 3D hardware that is installed in the computer or by emulating the capabilities of 3D hardware in software. The Direct3D device that an application creates must correspond to the capabilities of the hardware on which the application is running. These are provided by third parties to emulate particular devices - for example, developmental hardware that has not yet been released. The most common way to take advantage of these devices is to use the hal device for shipping applications, and the reference device for feature testing. Software and reference devices are represented by software drivers, and the hal device is represented by a hardware driver. You can think of these devices as two separate drivers.

A hal device with hardware-accelerated rasterization and shading with both hardware and software vertex processing.

Determining Hardware Support (Direct3D 9)Īrchitecturally, Direct3D devices contain a transformation module, a lighting module, and a rasterizing module, as the following diagram shows.ĭirect3D currently supports two main types of Direct3D devices:.

Windowed vs Full-Screen Mode (Direct3D 9).

In addition, a Direct3D device performs transformations and lighting operations and rasterizes an image to a surface. It encapsulates and stores the rendering state. A Direct3D device is the rendering component of Direct3D.

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