Entries for tag "pix", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 1.
# Direct2D versus Direct3D
Sun
20
May 2012
Direct2D library is not a completely new graphics API down to the driver level. It internally creates and uses Direct3D 10 device object. Of course it is a powerful library, not just a thin wrapper. But still everything ends up as a bunch of trianges uploaded to the buffer with Map/Unmap and sent to the GPU to be rendered using some vertex and pixel shader. PIX clearly shows all this:
As a result, Direct2D is able to exchange data with Direct3D 10. Unfortunately it's not the case with Direct3D 11. Topic How to use D2D with D3D11? at gamedev.net forum describes solution to this, full of problems and COM interface manipulation. Post DirectX Componentization and Interoperability by BenCon on DirectX Developer Blog nicely explains interop between different graphics API-s in Windows as a bigger picture. There is also a nasty hack to make D2D work (almost) directly with D3D11, described in post Hacking Direct2D to use directly Direct3D 11 instead of Direct3D 10.1 API on Code4k blog. But no clean and easy way exists.
So I give up with Direct2D for now. All in all, everything can be done by rendering triangles directly in Direct3D :P One thing I'll be missing is the perspective of easy high-quality text rendering with DirectWrite. Well, I'll go back to Bitmap Font Generator from AngelCode :P