Beyond3D takes a look at the DirectX9 technology usage in Half Life 2 shown at ATI's recent "Shader Day".
Valve appeared to be very happy with the way they were able to implement DirectX9 into their engine and the way it utilised the hardware. The nature of the way they were able to implement DirectX9 allowed them to more effectively expose the underlying hardware and make efficient use of it. They cite the example of the Radeon 9800 able to run the full DirectX9 functionality at the same performance as the DX8 path despite the fact that the DirectX9 path has a greater feature utilisation. From here on in, anything new added will only be DirectX9.Read more
