April 2005 SDK Released..

The DirectX 9.0 SDK enables developers to build outstanding games and graphics applications by taking full advantage of DirectX technologies built into Microsoft Windows. Updated every two months, the DirectX SDK provides additional C/C++ and Managed libraries, samples, tools and documentation over and above the Microsoft Platform SDK.

For more information about developing Games for Windows titles or with DirectX in general, see the Microsoft DirectX Developer Center or e-mail directx@microsoft.com.

What’s New in the April 2005 Update

This release includes changes to D3DX library, graphics samples, tools, and documentation updates. Updated developer runtimes and the DirectX Redistributable (DirectX 9.0c) are also included. The following features have changed for this release; for a complete list of updates, please refer to the "What's New in DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (April 2005)" page in the SDK documentation.

D3DX Updates

• UVAtlas API - These new API's automatically generate a unique UV texture mapping for an arbitrary mesh, maximizing texture space usage and minimizing texture undersampling (stretch).
• Reduced effects memory footprint - A new flag (D3DXFX_NOT_CLONEABLE) has been added to allow users to specify that an effect will never need to be cloned by the effect system. Using this flag can notably reduce the memory footprint for an effect.
• The precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) system has been enhanced with fast raytracing methods have been added for direct computation of ray/mesh intersections against a simulation scene.

Documentation Updates

• Setup documentation - The DXSetup documentation has been updated to explain the redist naming scheme and how you can customize the redist to reduce your installation size.

DXUT Updates

• Callback functions now pass a void* pUserContext that allows the callback functions to receive context from the application.
• The framework's GUI is now separate and optional from the core framework.
• The framework now allows applications to reject device changes via LPDXUTCALLBACKMODIFYDEVICESETTINGS which returns a bool.
• Passing 0 as the width and height to DXUTCreateDevice now creates a backbuffer of the same size as the client window.
• DXUTGetExitCode now returns 11 if the last device was a D3DDEVTYPE_REF device type.

Technical Article Updates

• The DirectX developer Frequenty Asked Questions (FAQs) page has been added to the documentation.
• A new technical article about the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 has been added.

PIX Tool Updates

• You can now open full-stream capture PIXRun files, and render frames from them within PIX, the same way you can with single-frame capture PIXRun files.
• You can save rendered frames to an image file from within PIX.
• You can adjust the scaling of the Y-axis of the event timeline to see data graphed more clearly.

DirectX Component Status

• Microsoft DirectPlay is deprecated, and Microsoft strongly recommends against using it to develop new applications. Game developers should instead use enhanced core Microsoft Windows networking technologies.
• Microsoft DirectInput, Microsoft DirectMusic, Microsoft DirectShow, and Microsoft DirectSound will maintain their current status until new technology in these areas is made available.
• Use of Microsoft DirectDraw is no longer recommended. With the release of DirectX 9.0, all two-dimensional (2-D) functionality is contained within Microsoft Direct3D and its associated helper functions in D3DX. However, the DirectDraw documentation is still available and can be viewed at the MSDN Library Archive at DirectDraw.