Hiding a Clingerman to Talk Natively
In Benchmarking C#/.Net Direct3D 11 APIs vs native C++ (a post from March 14, I wonder why I did not share this already…) Alexandre Mutel explores the cost of calling native APIs from managed code (AKA interop) via micro benchmarking various managed Direct3D 11 APIs. He does this because:
Hopefully, in SharpDX unlike any other DirectX .NET APIs, this code has been written to be consistent over the whole generated code, and was carefully designed to be quite efficient… but still, It has obviously a cost, and we need to know it!
Spoiler: The offerings Microsoft has in store are, by far, slower than SlimDX/SharpDX.
In other news: There is a thread over in the AppBuhAppHub forums praising the XNA MVPs. We here in the barracks fully support that effort – mostly due to the fact that Captain ZSquare has access to various arms here and we lost the keys to lock up the arsenal… – so you might head over to add to the +1 (none of the Google +1 stuff) choir.
SharpDX 1.0 Released to the Masses
Fresh off the press comes the word that SharpDX – the not so competitive competitor to SlimDX – 1.0 release is official now.
This first version can be considered as stable. The Direct3D10 / Direct3D10.1 API has been entirely tested on a large 3D engine that was using previously SlimDX (thanks patapom!). Migration was quite straightforward, with tiny minor changes to the engine's code.
Continue at the source to learn about the key features and benefits of this new API. Additionally, there is an interesting tidbit for the XNA crowd at the very end of the post:
Finally, I'm going to be able to use this project to make some demos with it! Next target is to develop a XNA like based framework based on SharpDX.Direct3D11.