What’s new in Microsoft DX6
multi-texture and new blend modes
- light / shadow maps
- environment / reflection maps
- bump maps
emphasis is on texture blend operation and texture rate, not fill rate
- without hardware multitexture, HW must burn fill rate to perform multipass
stencil
- real-time real shadows (also precalculated shadow maps)
- real-time real geometric reflections and transparency
floating point Z/W buffer
- increased depth resolution (reduces application depth and clip management)
more efficient HW DDI (30-50% less overhead on CPU/bus)
- less data transferred to graphics HW
- CPU moves data across the bus fewer times
- improved transform and lighting code (CPU-specific optimizations)