Few days ago I was wondering how long it will take to see DirectX 11 headers translated to Delphi/Pascal. I knew that translations of new DX components Direct2D and DirectWrite are part of Delphi 2010, but what about Direct3D and DirectCompute?
I checked out Clootie graphics pages but no luck there. Unfortunately, it's not so active anymore. After that I thought DX11 for Pascal wouldn't appear in like several months at least. Surprise, I found it about 5 minutes later. John Bladen published his DX11 translation on DirectX for Delphi blog. Thanks John!
Now all that remains is buying a DX11 GPU. New Radeons should be released sometime during this week and I'm thinking of getting 5850 model in a few months. Rumours are that NVidia's DX11 cards won't be out before 2010, so probably no big price drops for 5800 Radeons are to be expected until then.
My pile of old graphic cards will get bigger once again. I don't buy new CPU/motherboard/RAM too often (now it's Core2 from 2007 and before that AthlonXP in 2002) and I usually manage to sell the old ones or put them on server duty somewhere. However, since GPU performance as well as requirements on it rise much more faster than that of CPU, I ended up with like 5 cards in last 8 years. I managed to sell Radeon 9000 and GeForce 6600 but I still have Riva TNT2 and Radeon X1950 in my closet somewhere (and S3 Trio!). Hopefully, I'll find a buyer for my 1GB 4850 soon.
Lately, I've had bad luck buying some new stuff just before major price drop. Hopefully, this won't happen with 5850. Not that I want it to remain expensive - just want to buy it after the drop, not a little while before it.
Thanks Marek. I want to help keep Delphi up to date with the latest developments such as DirectX. I have very limited time, but I can do the C++ to Delphi translations quite quickly. (With the Direct3D 11 translations, the main delay was that Microsoft hadn’t finished their bit! – see my blog for a workaround).
Delphi is a very excellent language and development environment. In particular, it enables small teams (e.g. 1 person) to match or outperform huge teams. I love the quick development cycle – from code change to running application in practically zero time. It means that you can work very fast, and I believe that it is vital if you are going to produce quality code. When working with C++ or VB.Net I truly spend over half my working day waiting for the compiler.
Regarding Direct3D, like you I have piles of graphics cards! But I need the computer shaders in Direct3D 11, so I’ll be shopping soon.
So far I’ve been impressed with Direct3D 11. All my tests and code conversions have worked pretty much first time. We skipped Direct3D 10 because it didn’t offer us anything more than Direct3D 9 and the code conversion was difficult for our large code base. The Direct3D 11 API is similar to Direct3D 10 but is tidier, and also adds many new features.
JB.
I fully agree with you about the benefits of fast dev cycle in Delphi. I still vividly remember working on quite large (5MB of code) C++ project and those long waits for the compiler (some years ago with single core CPU and 256MB memory). Sometimes it could really disrupt my concentration on the problem I was solving.
I tried compiling your headers with FPC and identified few issues there. Are you or anyone you know working on getting the headers working with FPC at the moment? Maybe I could help here.