Because Microsoft hasn't been as strict in the past, we've seen some issues where ATI and NVIDIA don't provide the exact same result due to rounding and accuracy differences. Sticking to such a standard allows programmers to guarantee that operations will be consistent between different types of hardware. IEEE 754 is a specification that defines all aspects of floating point interaction.

Increasing the flexibility of the hardware and enabling programmers to employ methods commonly used on more general purpose hardware will certainly be helpful in creating a better platform for developers to create the effects they desire.įloating point operations have also been enhanced, as Microsoft has placed tighter requirements on how to handle the numbers. This means programmers can make use of traditional data structures and memory operations. With DX10, integer and bitwise operations have been added to the mix. This means that operations like memory addressing and array indexing (which use integer values) must be done carefully if interpolation is to be avoided. Until now, shaders have been exclusively floating point. Here's a table comparing DX9 and DX10 shader models.Īlong with these changes, Microsoft has made some lower level adjustments.

Aside from defining the capabilities and instructions that the different shaders must support, Microsoft also specifies attributes like precision, number of instructions that can make up a shader program, and the number of registers available to the programmer.

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