The February 2010 DirectX SDK is available!

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The February 2010 DirectX SDK was released just moments ago. In this release, PIX for Windows has been updated with much fuller support for Direct3D 11 analysis. If you're using Direct3D 11, you'll definitely want to pick up this version of the DXSDK in order to be able to use great PIX features such as shader debugging and the mesh viewer with your Direct3D 11 programs. There are also a few new features that help with analysis of programs using any version of Direct3D.

Here's the official "What's New" announcement:

What's New in the February 2010 DirectX SDK

This version of the DirectX SDK contains the following new features, tools, and documentation.

Improvements to PIX

PIX has much-improved support for analysis of programs that use Direct3D 11 features, including compute shaders, tessellation, and dynamic shader class linkage. PIX features such as pixel history, the shader debugger, the mesh viewer, frame counters, and screenshots now work for these Direct3D 11 programs.

The new "Playback Device" control in the Events pane enables the user to force PIX Direct3D playback to use the REF device.

Mesh viewer data can be exported to a CSV file by right-clicking the data tables displayed in the PreVS, PostVS, or PostGS views.

The texture viewer now supports the following additional formats:

  • DXGI_FORMAT_D24_UNORM_S8_UINT
  • DXGI_FORMAT_R24G8_TYPELESS
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC1_UNORM_SRGB
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC2_UNORM_SRGB
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC3_UNORM_SRGB

XNAMath C++ SIMD Math Library

A minor revision to the library (version 2.02), includes a number of customer-reported fixes, optimizations, and improvements. Included are notable fixes to XMStoreColor(), XMQuaternionRotationMatrix(), XMVectorATan2(), and XMVectorATan2Est().

Direct3D 11 Deployment

The Direct3D 11 Deployment for Game Developers article and D3D11InstallHelper Sample have been updated to include guidance for corporate network users in a locally managed Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) environment. For these developers, KB 971644 is not applicable and they should refer to KB 971512 instead.

Enhancements to Voice Reuse Scenarios

Implementation changes to simplify voice reuse were made to IXAudio2SourceVoice::FlushSourceBuffers, IXAudio2SourceVoice::SetSourceSamplingRate, and IXAudio2SourceVoice::Stop. These changes enable titles to minimize the performance cost of creating and destroying multiple voices during the game.

Reverb and Mixing Performance Optimizations

We have optimized the codepaths for several of the less common channel mixing scenarios for mixing within the audio graph.

　

-Mike