Base Direct X version

[jimflip]

Just wondering what's the base version of Direct X you lot are targeting?

[Mattias Gustavsson]

DirectX3 (optional)

[bignobody]

I believe Windows XP shipped with DirectX 8(.1?), so that's not a bad choice. I know some developers here support DirectX 7. IMHO going back any further is overkill.

[Sybixsus]

Hardware or software? I'm assuming you mean software, in which case I'm targetting DX9. I have a fallback system which uses completely different alternatives to materials, textures, shaders which it would use ideally, so it certainly won't require DX9-level hardware. In fact, last time I tested it was running quite nicely on mobile GPU's from a generation or two back, even with dynamic shadows. Sadly, I had to ditch stencil shadows in favour of shadow maps, so they won't be getting dynamic shadows any more. But no worries, there's every chance performance would have discouraged them from enabling shadows on those cards anyway.

[Bad Sector]

Whatever SDL uses by default. I assume it's DirectX 7 or something but i think it also has a GDI fallback.

[bignobody]

Whatever SDL uses by default. I assume it's DirectX 7 or something but i think it also has a GDI fallback.

Actually, as of SDL 1.2.12 it uses the GDI by default...

[DGuy]

Actually, as of SDL 1.2.12 it uses the GDI by default...

Add I believe the DirectX version used by SDL is 5.0

[Sharpfish]

I started out with DX9 (the version I learned D3D coding with) but then dropped back to DX8 as it was far wider spread amongst my target users (Winxp and up).

[brianmeidell]

We release for DirectX 7, but also have renderers for DX9 and OpenGL.
We're considering going DX9 only for our next release though.

Last thing I hear from a publisher was something less than 15% of their users used Windows 2000, and that was a year ago.

[Polycount Productions]

I used DX7 for ages, now going for DX9.

Depends much of your audience. If you are not doing games for casual portals, then checking out these stats might be useful:
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
(keep in mind that these stats come from Valve's Steam - they are more in the "hardcore gamers" category than "casual gamers")

[jcottier]

My first game was using DX9. This was a bad choice as XP come with DX8 and a lot of people still haven't got DX9 install on their computer. In the casual market, there is a small % still under win98.

So, my new engine is using DX7 and my games runs almost on every PC with some kind of 3D cards.

If you target casual and not hardcore gamer then DX9, is the worst choice you could make. It is a only available with XP2 SP2.

JC

[brianmeidell]

I forgot to say we're doing casual games.
jcottier, thanks for your words of wisdom - until I saw this thread, I actually was under the impression that XP has DX9 from birth, even though I've looked at the directx page on wikipedia several times. I must have been seeing what I wanted to be seeing.

I guess we'll have to continue maintaining our FFP/DX7 renderer for a while then.

It sure would be nice if the portals would use their massive install base of delivery systems to gather statistics about stuff like this, rather than just give us advice like "programming for DirectX 0.1 beta gives you the largest possible chance of being compatible".

[Cygon]

Windows XP was released with DirectX 8.1,
Windows XP SP2 includes DirectX 9.0c

I'm targeting DirectX 9.0c with D3DX from August 2007, so I'll require XP SP2 or Vista and a post-install of the DirectX 9.0c Aug2007 update. That, and .NET 2.0. My installer, without any game content, is already 30 MB, so the final game download will probably be in the 40-50 MB range.

-Markus-

[brianmeidell]

I'm targeting DirectX 9.0c with D3DX from August 2007, so I'll require XP SP2 or Vista and a post-install of the DirectX 9.0c Aug2007 update. That, and .NET 2.0. My installer, without any game content, is already 30 MB, so the final game download will probably be in the 40-50 MB range.
-Markus-

Who is your target audience? what kind of game is it?

[Emmanuel]

If you're doing 2D, then Direct3D 7 is a safe baseline. There's a percentage of customers that don't have D3D9, so if you don't require its features, it's worth spending the extra day or two to write the extra page of code that will make your game work with D3D7. There are many subtle compatibility issues with any D3D version though, that can make your game fail on tens of thousands of customer machines, so if your intent is to sell games, I would really urge you to use an existing, field tested renderer such as the popcap framework (http://developer.popcap.com/), ptk (http://www.phelios.com/ptk), playground (http://developer.playfirst.com/) or hge (http://hge.relishgames.com/). The first three frameworks power multiple top 10 titles (and provide at least a D3D7 renderer), and HGE has been used for multiple casual game releases already (and provides a D3D8 renderer).

On the other hand, anything under D3D9 can create major performance issues on Vista, depending on drivers, and some D3D7 quirks such as texel to pixel alignment disappear when using the D3D9 interface.

Both the popcap framework and ptk will soon provide a D3D9 renderer (with D3D7 fallback at least in the case of ptk). Worth the extra few days of work for smooth performance on Vista and slightly better performance on XP if you're pushing a lot of quads for your particles.

The next Azada game will try D3D9 and fall back to D3D7 and finally software otherwise.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Cygon]

Who is your target audience? what kind of game is it?

I know you guys here are tempted to cry outrage!, sacrilege! upon hearing this, but I hope to find a sweet spot between the low-end casual and the high-end hardcore market.

The game is a cut down 3D RTS without movable units, done in XNA. It doesn't contain any puzzles, has no cute graphics and doesn't quite fit in with the scheme. My target audience are casual players with a semi-recent gaming rig or with an XBox 360 at home.

So, as I said in the other thread, either it works out or I come back here whining :p

-Markus-

[James C. Smith]

The next Azada game will try D3D9 and fall back to D3D7 and finally software otherwise.


For my new game I am using DX8. Am I getting the worst of both worlds? DX8 seems a little easier to program (managed textures) and very common. I don't see any reason to target DX7 since XP comes with DX8. Is DX8 slow on Vista or is that just DX7 and older?

I just seems strange that my preferred version of DX is the one that you skip. You support 9 and 7 but not 8. I am assuming you mostly use 7 because it was common when you started your codebase years ago. For someone starting out with a new engine today would you see any advantage to DX7 over DX8? I understand the advantages and disadvantages of DX9, and can see why you would use 9 and fallback to earlier version. But I don’t see the appeal of 7 VS 8.

[Emmanuel]

If I was to start from scratch and there was no easily available and tested engine around, I'd use DX8.1 as well. It removes some of the quirks of DX7 in general, and the drivers do less weird things that need to be worked around, when you talk to them using the DX8 or DX9 interface.

As you said, the only reason I fall back to DX7 and not 8 is that the DX7 codebase has been field-tested over tens of millions of downloads of my last five titles, and debugged for corner cases over many rounds of QA and compat testing (eg. "lock your laptop while textures are being uploaded on a i915"), plus all the other titles that were using the codebase already. I don't look forward to the DX9 compat pass we'll have to do! (but the benefits will outweigh the pain)

Best regards,
Emmanuel