DirectX® 9.0 and SmartShader™ 2.0 White Paper
Introduction
SmartShader™ 2.0, a new technology introduced in the Radeon™
9700 and 9500 families of Visual Processing Units, is the first
to support the exciting new 3D rendering capabilities of DirectX®
9.0, the latest Application Programming Interface from Microsoft®.
As the culmination of years of research into programmable shader
technology, it finally provides the necessary levels of programmability,
precision, and performance required to render visual effects
of arbitrary complexity. With support for high precision floating
point operations through all stages of the rendering process,
SmartShader 2.0 technology represents the dawn of a new era
for image quality.
Over the past year, ATI's 3D Application Research Group has
been studying the DirectX 9.0 specifications and working on
innovative and practical rendering techniques that demonstrate
some of the more interesting visual effects they make possible.
The result of this research is a set of stunning demos that
are now available to owners of graphics hardware with SmartShader
2.0 support, in conjunction with Microsoft's official release
of DirectX 9.0.
- The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview
of DirectX 9.0, describe the theory behind the demos, and
explain how they provide a glimpse of what 3D applications
will look like in the near future. The topics covered are
as follows:
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