Hi , I have been an old DirectX developer for several years now, and i have found direct3D Retained mode to be fast and simple to work with, a very comfortable solution for getting straight into your application with minimum overhead. And i did make extensive tests and compared speeds of applications i developed with Immediate mode and retained mode, the speeds were identical !!! It is true though that you have to free objects correctly etc.. but these are small things for the benefit you get. Now with the latest versions of DirectX ( starting with 6 ) and especially on 7, i have seem Microsoft drop Direct3D Retained mode and even add a utility library they call Direct3DX , it seems to me that they intend to get Direct3DX to where Direct3DRM was in the first place. So my question is why did they drop Direct3D Retained mode in the first place, instead of exposing it more to Immediate mode code in the form of UserVisuals etc, we could have the best of both worlds and enjoy fast development times ! Anyone who has a clue, and anyone especially from Microsoft please answer this is important !!! Thanks Ilan Papini

Hi,

As i said i HAVE written games using Retained mode that used very large scenes and a lot of static objects and you name it.

Just take a look at www.avsim.com/vs and see what i am talking about.

But i have also cloned some of them in immediate mode and i tested frame rates, i could not find a noticable difference in the heavy samples i made.

One of the reasons was that the bottleneck was the graphic accelerator and not the thin layer that RM added above the IM.

The benfit of handling frame hirarchies and X files etc, was very important for rapid game development.

And what''s more i now have seen that DirectX8 ( Farenheight ) will include the frame hirarchies again and will contain similar methods to RM and OpenInventor.

So it seems RM will smile again soon.

If anyone knows more about Farenheight plase explain, i am dieing to hear more !

Ilan

quote:Original post by DaBit

There are several reasons why D3DRM is frozen:

- It is hardly used by any developer because of the ''Immediate Mode is better'' idea almost every developer has.

- It is not very suitable for the main application field of D3D, games. Games use very sophisticated culling/rendering pipes to allow large worlds to be handled. Especially for static scenery D3DRM sucks. A simple BSP is already faster. (It is true that this could also be done in a UserVisual)

- For the applications that benefit the most of D3DRM, the current version is sufficient. (those apps do not use multitexturing and the like)

DaBit.