🎉8️⃣🖥️DirectX 8 turns 25 years old!
And to celebrate this occasion, here is information from Andrew Willmott’s presentation (audio) about the role of DirectX 8 (DX8) in the development of The Sims 2:
DX8 as a Target Platform and Technical Configuration
DirectX 8 was one of the target platforms for The Sims 2’s graphics system.
However, the main target hardware for the developers was still machines with DX7-level graphics cards.
The technical features planned for DX8 included:
• Hardware Vertex Processing (HWVP)
• Software skinning
• Vertex/Pixel Shader lighting (VS/PS lighting)
For comparison, the DX9 path included HWVP, hardware skinning, VS/PS lighting, and framebuffer effects.
Development Investment and Final Decisions
The shader path planned for DX8 consumed most of the graphics development time, but was ultimately dropped in the final weeks of the project.
The system was too inefficient to handle the large number of different shaders required for that path.
DX8 development was significant: during the final year, one engineer was almost fully dedicated to material scripting, which included working on DX8, writing code in Azim, and handling many different edge cases.
Associated Technical Challenges
Older drivers (DX8-level) did not support depth buffer copies. This caused compatibility issues, especially due to the “dirty rect” rendering system.
The FX series graphics card line was treated as a DX8 component because its performance was too low to fully utilize the features of DX9.
Extracted from the presentation using NotebookLM.
Read more about the historical impact of DirectX 8 here:
25 Years Ago Today, Microsoft Released DirectX 8 and Changed PC Graphics Forever