With the retirement of D3DX (See “ Where is the DirectX SDK? ”), there is some confusion about how applications access the High-Level Shader Language ( HLSL ) compiler. As mentioned in an earlier post (See “ What’s up with D3DCompiler_xx.DLL? ”), the HLSL compilation functions...

In the DirectX SDK (June 2010) release, the HLSL compiler was updated from the August 2009 version. As part of this update, the HLSL complier now supports a new feature: symbolic derivatives . If you are interested in learning more about what this feature is and what you can do with it, you should check...

One of our areas of focus for the DirectX SDK (June 2010) release was to make sure our samples supported Direct3D 11 hardware from NVIDIA , as we had previously only had AMD/ATI Direct3D 11 hardware to work with. There were a few issues that arose right around the release with the SubD11 and PNTriangles...

The June 2010 release of the DirectX SDK is now available on Microsoft Downloads . This release introduces official support for Visual Studio 2010, an updated version of the HLSL compiler with numerous fixes and minor improvements, improved documentation and samples, XNAMath C++ SIMD library version...

For most of the early evolution of the HLSL language, the compiler was part of the D3DX utility library (aka D3DX9). This compiler supported Shader Models 1.x, 2.0, and 3.0 for Direct3D 9 vertex shaders and pixel shaders. For Direct3D 10, the graphics team started a new compiler to support the demands...