Time runs fast if you are busy. It’s is more than a month since my last entry and at least two months to wait for the next DirectX SDK.

In the mean time I am doing some work on my codeplex project. The biggest hole is still the Direct3D9 part but it gets some updates lately. But I am although adding some code for Direct3D9Ex and the upcoming Direct3D 10.1.

An interesting aspect of Direct3D 10.1 is that you can create a D3D10.1 device even on Direct3D 10.0 Hardware. The new functions will not work and therefore we got some kind of a caps system back. But instead of many bits and values there is only a global enumerator. The D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL1 value that need to provided during device creation  select the feature set .

Currently there are two values: D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_0 and D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_1. There is no D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_0 but from the technical point of view it would not impossible to write a Direct3D 10 runtime that works with older Direct3D 9 level hardware. It need to provide an additional interface to query the caps but beside of this it would simplify the development of applications that need to scale over a large  range of GPUs. But to make it useful this runtime need to be part of the redistributable DirectX components and work on Windows XP too.

I don’t expect such a solution from Microsoft but as it could build on top of Direct3D it can be done as an community project.