apHarmony will be happy to bring our DirectX software development experience to your next software project. Whether you are building an interactive 2D or 3D application, leveraging HLSL shaders, or using DirectX for data analysis, please feel free to give us a call at 630-855-7522 for a free consultation.

The DirectX toolkit was developed by Microsoft to leverage the advanced capabilities of graphics cards and multimedia on the Windows platform. Its capabilities extend to 3D graphics, 2D graphics, input handling, and sound. Although each component adds capability beyond the native Windows functionality, the most powerful components of DirectX lie in the high-speed rendering of 2D and 3D graphics using HLSL pixel shaders.

An HLSL shader is a program run on the graphics card for rendering in the graphics pipeline. It consists of two primary components - the vertex shader and the pixel shader. Vertex shaders take the polygons that make up a scene, and define how they will be displayed on the screen. Once the vertex pass is complete, the pixel shader then defines how the textures and lighting will interact with those polygons.

The realism of a particular application lies primarily in the pixel shader. Techniques such as normal maps, specular highlights, gloss reflections, and shader models can be used to create realistic renders. With a well-built shader chain, photo-quality images can be rendered in real time and manipulated on-screen.

In addition to rendering 3D models, DirectX can also be used for 2D graphics effects. Pixel shaders are able to execute blend operations much faster than traditional methods using per-pixel operations. The parallelism of the GPU (graphics processing unit) is able to run operations across numerical arrays much faster than the CPU. This technology can also be exploited for data analytics, to quickly analyze large matrices and data sets.

For a free consultation on a DirectX custom software development project, please feel free to give us a call at 630-855-7522.