***Conference Report - WDM Device Driver Conference
by John Latta
Held on 11 April after WinHEC this was another packed conference. With
over 2,000 attendees, 250 signed up for the sessions on Graphics
Drivers. The conference was over-subscribed and the attendance had to
be cut off on Thursday before the event. The WAVE Report attended the
Graphics session and even here all those who wanted to attend could not
fit into the one conference room. A separate video session was held
simultaneously across the hall.
The presentations were technical and provided both details on driver
development and access to key individuals at Microsoft. At the end of
each session there were many questions. Microsoft has surfaced its
concerns about the quality of drivers and this was an opportunity for
the developer community to learn. At the same time a number of
technical details came out of interest to WAVE Report readers.
Both Memphis and Windows NT 5.0 will support MultiMonitors. This will
allow more than one graphics adapter to be used at one time. The ways
in which this can be used include: multiple independent displays, large
desktops and multiuser support (NT 5.0). There is still a requirement
of one VGA capable adapter but there were hints that this may
eventually go away.
Some hints were also made about future capabilities in Direct3D. These
include richer geometries including other types of surface
descriptions, progressive meshes and on the fly tessellation. Support
for hardware transform and lighting was discussed. However, the
lighting being considered would only be accomplished as multiple
textures per surface and not traditional lighting done at the front end
of the pipeline. All of this is in a very early state and attendees
were encouraged to attend Meltdown 97 in July.
Wave Issue 9707 4/14/97 Article 8-01