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DEVICE GUIDE

Device Guide

This document lists various notes, capabilities, and limitations about each Visualize driver interface. These should be taken into consideration when programming your application as not every driver interface is as capable as the others. Some have external software dependencies, and some are not compatible with Visualize (due to bugs in the vendor drivers or other limitations). See the graphics card information page for more details.

In addition to conventional on-screen rendering, all driver interfaces additionally support hardware-accelerated rendering to a memory buffer. For information on how to set up an offscreen rendering context, see section 7.2 of the Core Graphics Programming Guide.

All Visualize windows are double-buffered.

DirectX9

The DirectX9 driver is a shader-based interface to Microsoft's DirectX9 API, and is supported in Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP2.

In your code, the DirectX9 interface can be selected using the Window::Driver::DirectX9 enum value.

Runtime Requirements

In order to use the DirectX9 driver, the d3dcompiler DLL must be made available in the execution environment of the target machine. We distribute this file with the Visualize package. If you are building with Visual Studio 2012 (and hence using the Windows 8.0 SDK), the file is d3dcompiler_46.dll. If you are building with 2013 (8.1 SDK) you need to include the file d3dcompiler_47.dll.


DirectX11

The DirectX11 driver is supported in Windows 8 and Windows 7. In Windows Vista, DirectX11 requires Service Pack 2+, and installation of the most current Vista platform updates as of October 1, 2013.

In your code, the DirectX11 interface can be selected using the Window::Driver::DirectX11 enum value.

Runtime Requirements

In order to use the DirectX11 driver, the d3dcompiler DLL must be made available in the execution environment of the target machine. We distribute this file with the Visualize package. If you are building with Visual Studio 2012 (and hence using the Windows 8.0 SDK), the file is d3dcompiler_46.dll. If you are building with 2013 (8.1 SDK) you need to include the file d3dcompiler_47.dll.

Notes

When depth peeling is requested on a DirectX11 compliant video card, the DX11 driver will utilize a more advanced order-independent transparency algorithm. The algorithm can accurately draw up to 16 layers of transparency with minimal performance implications.

 


OpenGL

The Visualize OpenGL driver interface requires the host platform to have OpenGL 1.1 or higher. Note that OpenGL 1.1 is not a shader-based API, so shaders and post-processing effects (which depend on shaders) will not work. OpenGL is supported on Windows and Linux.

Linux-specific information

For the OpenGL interface to work, X11 must be running on the host machine.

Known Restrictions

When running an OpenGL application on one platform and displaying on another we have seen a few specific problems:

In your code, the OpenGL interface can be selected using the Window::Driver::OpenGL enum value.


OpenGL2

OpenGL2 is a shader-based driver interface that requires the host platform to have OpenGL 2.0+ or OpenGL ES 2.0. The Visualize OpenGL2 driver interface is supported on all platforms.

Limitations

In your code, the OpenGL2 interface can be selected using the Window::Driver::OpenGL2 enum value.