XeNTaX

But what were really their major and most important milestones, breaks or introduction of new things in D3D development? Whatever someone knows in few words and how that impacted the graphics in the games. Or if that would be too much then what was the TOP major item spelling progress for D3D.

Direct3D 5.0 introduced the DrawPrimitive API that eliminated the need for applications to construct execute buffers.

Direct3D 6.0 introduced numerous features to cover contemporary hardware (such as multitexture and stencil buffers) as well as optimized geometry pipelines for x87, SSE and 3DNow and optional texture management to simplify programming. Direct3D 6.0 also included support for features that had been licensed by Microsoft from specific hardware vendors for inclusion in the API, in exchange for the time-to-market advantage to the licensing vendor. S3 texture compression support was one such feature, renamed as DXTC for purposes of inclusion in the API. Another was TriTech's proprietary bump mapping technique. By including these features in DirectX, Microsoft virtually guaranteed that all PC graphics hardware vendors would support the feature at their earliest opportunity, driving industry standardization in a way that was inconceivable under the auspices of the OpenGL Architectural Review Board.

Direct3D 7.0 introduced the .dds texture format and support for transform and lighting hardware acceleration (first available on PC hardware with NVIDIA's GeForce), as well as the ability to allocate vertex buffers in hardware memory. Hardware vertex buffers represent the first substantive improvement over OpenGL in DirectX history. Direct3D 7.0 also augmented DirectX support for multitexturing hardware, and represents the pinnacle of fixed-function multitexture pipeline features: although powerful, it was so complicated to program that a new programming model was needed to expose the shading capabilities of graphics hardware.

Direct3D 8.0 introduced programmability in the form of vertex and pixel shaders, enabling developers to write code without worrying about superfluous hardware state. They wrote simple shaders to do simple tasks or more complicated shaders to do more complex tasks, and the display driver compiled those shaders to instructions that could be understood by the hardware. Direct3D 8.0 and its programmable shading capabilities were the first major departure from an OpenGL-style fixed-function architecture, where drawing is controlled by a complicated state machine.

Direct3D 8.0 also eliminated DirectDraw as a separate API. Direct3D subsumed all remaining DirectDraw API calls still needed for application development, such as Present(), the function used to display rendering results.

Direct3D was not considered to be user friendly, but as of DirectX version 8.1, many usability problems were resolved. Direct3D 8 contained many powerful 3D graphics features, such as vertex shaders, pixel shaders, fog, bump mapping and texture mapping.

DirectX version 9.0 added a new version of the High Level Shader Language, support for high dynamic range lighting, multiple render targets, and vertex buffer indexing.

DirectX version 10.0, included with Windows Vista, is described in the next section

Xela wrote:Controversy regarding M$ practices is well known. One would see them as "inconceivable" and another as "strictly business". I wanted to put this in some kind of general perspective and fish out the most prominent features of each iteration of D3D. All's found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D