Up until my new game (still un-named) I’ve been using version 7 of directx in my engine. How old is directx7 well lets see…
When Directx7 came out…
The Dow Jones was around 10,305 (it's 8,903 today!)
Harold Shipman had just been found guilty of murder.
George W Bush had just won the primaries, along with Al Gore.
Vladimir Putin was about to be elected head of Russia.
so it’s….
March 8th 2000.
So I think we can all agree it’s the time I GOT WITH THE TIMES, and at least caught up as far as DX9. It’s going quite well, I have lots of groovy stuff on screen, with decent frame rates despite zero real optimisations. So that’s cool (still need to get my text engine ported accross).
Why do it?
I wanted to do a game with lots of flashy graphics in, and have decent driver support. DX7 is unsupported now, and the nvidia profiling tools only work with directx9. A lot of cards are now just emulating dx7 using dx9 calls anyway, so it’s silly not to talk to the card in a language it understands.
Why not DX10?
That isn’t as widespread on peoples machines. Although my next game will not be that casual, I don’t want to assume people have DX10, as I certainly won’t be including it in my games installer. It offers no real advantage for 2D gaming over DX9, AFAIK.