Introduction To 3d Game Programming With Direct3d 12.0

[Cori Riska]

Thispage contains some general information about the book Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 12.0, published by Mercury Learning and Information, that will help you decide if this book is for you.

This book presents an introduction to programming interactive computer graphics, with an emphasis on game development, using Direct3D 12. It teaches the fundamentals of Direct3D and shader programming, after which the reader will be prepared to go on and learn more advanced techniques. The book is divided into three main parts. Part I explains the mathematical tools that will be used throughout this book. Part II shows how to implement fundamental tasks in Direct3D, such as initialization, defining 3D geometry, setting up cameras, creating vertex, pixel, geometry, and compute shaders, lighting, texturing, blending, stenciling, and tessellation. Part III is largely about applying Direct3D to implement a variety of interesting techniques and special effects, such as working with meshes, character animation, picking, particle systems, environment mapping, normal mapping, real-time shadows, and ambient occlusion.

It should be emphasized that this is an introduction to Direct3D 12, shader programming, and game programming; it is not an introduction to general computer programming. The reader should satisfy the following prerequisites:

This page contains some general information about the book Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach, published by Jones and Bartlett Learning, that will help you decide if this book if for you.

This book presents an introduction to programming interactive computer graphics, with an emphasis on game development, using real-time shaders with DirectX 9.0. It teaches the fundamentals of Direct3D and shader programming, after which the reader will be prepared to go on and learn more advanced techniques. The book is divided into three main parts. Part I explains the mathematical tools that will be used throughout this book. Part II shows how to implement, using shaders and the HLSL, elementary 3D techniques, such as defining 3D geometry, lighting, texturing, alpha blending, and stenciling. Part III is largely about applying Direct3D to implement a variety of interesting techniques and special effects, such as working with meshes, character animation, terrain rendering, picking, particle systems, environment mapping, normal mapping, and rendering to textures.

This second edition has been rewritten almost from scratch. This new edition largely abandons the fixed pipeline used in the first edition to give a complete programmable, or shader, approach. From Chapter 7 onwards, we are transforming, lighting, and coloring vertices and pixels in vertex and pixel shaders. This significant revision in approach reflects the fact that the fixed pipeline will not exist in DirectX 10.

Another key feature of the second edition is the inclusion of end of chapter exercises. The exercises serve three purposes: First, to test the reader's understanding of each chapter's contents; second, to provide the reader with Direct3D programming experience; and third, to extend the chapter's topics by asking the reader to investigate new ideas on his/her own. In many cases, the exercises are not of the "plug and chug" type, but require the reader to reason about how to apply the chapter's topics to the particular assignment. Readers are encouraged to complete chapter exercises before moving on to the next chapter.

To program Direct3D 9 applications, you will need the DirectX 9 SDK; the latest version can be downloaded here. Once downloaded, follow the instructions given by the installation wizard. As of the March 2008 DirectX SDK release, the SDK will only officially support versions of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. This book's demo programs require DirectX 9.0 capable hardware that supports vertex and pixel shader versions 2.0. At the time of this book, low-end video cards supporting these requirements are available for about $50 (e.g., Radeon 9600, Geforce FX 5500).

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Frank Luna has been programming interactive 3D graphics with DirectX for more than fifteen years. He is the author of three bestselling books on DirectX and has worked in 3D medical visualization, 3D architectural design software, and gaming. He holds a BS in mathematics from the University of California, Irvine.

This is the first lesson in a series of lessons to teach you how to create a DirectX 12 application from scratch. In this lesson, you will learn how to query for DirectX 12 capable display adapters that are available, create a DirectX 12 device, create a swap-chain, and you will also learn how to present the swap chain back buffer to the screen. In this lesson, you will also create a command queue and a command list and learn how to synchronize the CPU and GPU operations in order to correctly implement N-buffered rendering.

DirectX 12 is the successor of the DirectX 11 SDK and represents the largest architectural change to the SDK since the inception of DirectX. The primary reason for this change is the demand from the gaming industry to provide a rendering SDK that gives more power and control to the graphics programmer. Vendor-specific driver implementations were often complex and imposed a CPU performance overhead that the developer had no control over. Much of this overhead could be avoided if you give control back to the developers. One example of the driver overhead that is present in previous versions of the DirectX SDK is resource management. Drivers needed to track the lifetime of every resource that was used by the rendering pipeline. Tracking of resources by the driver is often unnecessary if it can be assumed that the application programmer can perform this task with much less overhead. Providing the developers with the tools to implement their own resource management takes that responsibility away from the driver implementation and often allows for performance improvements if done correctly.

DirectX is a collection of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) developed by Microsoft. The various components of the DirectX API provide low-level access to the hardware running on Windows based operating systems [6].

The first version of DirectX was not released at the same time as Windows 95 but shortly after it in September 1995 [6]. It was initially released under the name Windows Game SDK. DirectX 2.0 was released in June 1996 and just four months later, the DirectX 3.0 APIs were released [7]. Through the period of 1995-1997, the DirectX library went through several version changes to reach version 5. Subsequent major revisions were released on an annual basis until DirectX 9 which was released two years after DirectX 8 [6].

DirectX 8.0 was released in November 2000 and introduced programmable vertex and pixel shaders giving the graphics programmer full control over the processing of the vertex and shading stages of the rendering pipeline. Shader Model 1 [9] was the first shader model which introduced vertex and pixel shaders to the programmable pipeline.

DirectX 9.0c was released in August 2004 and introduced Shader Model 3.0 [7]. Shader Model 3.0 extended on Shader Model 2.0 by adding additional functions to the HLSL shader language and increased the instruction count for vertex and pixel shaders allowing for more complex shader programs.

In November 2006, DirectX 10 was released featuring Shader Model 4.0 providing backward compatability with Shader Model 3.0 but deprecating Shader Model 1.0 [10]. Shader Model 4.0 lifted the shader instruction limits and added the geometry shader profiles to the programmable shader pipeline. The geometry shader allows the graphics programmer to create new geometric primitives from simpler primitives (for example, take a single point as input to the geometry shader and produce a set of triangles).

DirectX 11 was released in October 2009 and introduced Shader Model 5.0 [7]. Shader Model 5.0 added support for tessellation shaders as well as computer shaders. Tessellation shaders provide the ability to dynamically refine the level of detail of a model by computing the triangle primitives from control points of a Bezier surface (for example, but other tessellation techniques can also be implemented in the tessellation shader). Compute shaders allow the graphics programmer to create general purpose programs that advantage of the massive parallelism of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

On July 29, 2015, together with the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft released version 12 of the DirectX API. DirectX 12 (and Direct3D 11.3) also introduced Shader Model 5.1. Shader Model 5.1 did not add any new programmable stages to the shader pipeline but it added support for accessing resources by indexing into descriptor arrays. Texture arrays were already possible prior to Shader Model 5.1 but each texture in the array had to have the same size (width, height) and storage format. Using descriptor arrays allows texture of varying dimensions and storage formats to be accessed from a single shader variable. The only restriction is the variable type (for example Texture1D, Texture2D, or Texture3D).

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