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Video rendering resource sites

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by house

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I had originally posted my question here...
https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-6239-0.html?forumID=48&threadID=164242&start0

I've change the question to allow me to do some research.
I am interested in some excellent resource sites.
Sites that have "in depth" information on the following.

a) Graphics Engines - lists and technical info
b) Video device drivers - pretty much "the way things work" inside and out
c) Direct X - DirectX and indepth dll info

I know that this is fairly general, but anybody who has experience with games might have some links to which they could refer me.

Thank you,
house

6 replies

by apotheon

I'm not sure exactly what sort of information you're looking for (Developer data? Compatibility issues? Graphics engine evaluation? et cetera), but I'll throw some information at you.

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/
This provides a lot of development information about graphics engine development. It touches on areas like the capabilities of the major graphics APIs (OpenGL and DirectX), the limitations of various development platforms, and methodology for development using various engines.

http://cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html
This is essentially an orgy of (somewhat biased) evaluations of various 3D graphics engines. Much of the information on the site is summarized and abbreviated, but links are provided to websites devoted to the particular engines where more information can be found. It's somewhat better organized than the last link, even if the site design is somewhat fugly.

http://www.technomagi.com/links/graphics.html
This is for armchair game designers, basically. It provides amateur tutorials, evaluations, and howtos. Keep in mind that in this case "amateur" also applies to the fact that some of what is here might contribute to forming bad habits with game design. On the other hand, there's a lot of information there.

http://www.filename.info/f/dxdiag.exe.html
This is sort of a quick breakdown of what dxdiag is. It's probably not what you're looking for, but this is a very useful site for figuring out what a given file does, so I thought I'd throw it in here anyway.

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;q190900
Speaking of the DirectX diagnostic tool, this is the official Microsoft description of it.

(to be continued, due to character limits)

by apotheon

http://www.videocardupgrade.com/dxdiag_tests.shtml
This is the dxdiag-specific section of a long howto relating to graphics/video card configuration. It provides some illustrated examples that might be enlightening. I'm afraid that's all I've got about the DirectX diagnostic tool. It's not something I've had to deal with much. Since you're asking about dxdiag at all, I'll not insult you by assuming you don't know how to open it.

http://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/mdx_tutorial1.asp
This is a managed DirectX tutorial. It's not for the faint of heart. It has been sitting around in my bookmarks, neglected, for some time because it's not terribly accessible, but it seems to contain useful information. If you want to do DirectX-related programming, this might be a good early step in the process of learning it. Of course, I'd recommend going with OpenGL instead, but that's not what you asked about.

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article928.asp
This is just a DLL interface howto.

For more information relating to DirectX, specifically as regards 3D rendering, I recommend you do a Google search for Direct3D.

Hopefully, something in this is of some use to you.

by apotheon

NOTE: I must have misremembered something about you asking about dxdiag. Maybe you mentioned it somewhere else, or somebody else did. In any case, if you're looking for DirectX configuration data, dxdiag is probably going to be useful.

by house

Poster rated this answer.
Wow, this was exactly what I was looking for. One or two of the sites that you mentioned, I'd already seen. Devmaster is a key example of the kind of info I was looking for. I didn't even have the chance to look at half of them. I got hung up on codeproject.com because of the oldschool Metroid bit. Thanx again.

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