Direct3D's Engine

At the heart of the Direct3D architecture is a 3-D rendering engine that consists of a three-stage graphics pipeline. Each stage is a separate dynamically loaded software module. You start a rendering operation by first making Direct3D API calls to set up the graphics state for each module and then dropping an execute buffer into the engine. The first module, the transformation module, processes any required geometric transformations on the object. The second module, the lighting module, computes the illumination for each object and can handle several types of light sources (e.g., ambient, point, directional, and spot lighting). The final module is the rasterization module, which takes the results of the first two modules and generat es a bit-mapped scene.

You can switch each of these modules on the fly via software control. This allows modules with different or enhanced capabilities to be substituted in the pipeline. Some of these modules might communicate with hardware accelerators. Note that it's possible for every stage of the graphics pipeline to be accelerated by hardware.

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Direct3D Contact Information

You don't need a special licensing agreement or have to pay royalty fees to use DirectX 2.0 SDK, which contains Direct3D. To obtain further information about DirectX, consult the Microsoft Web site ( http://www.microsoft.com/imedia ).

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Microsoft's 3-D Platform

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