This release includes technical previews of Direct2D, DirectWrite and DXGI 1.1. Direct2D is a hardware-accelerated, immediate-mode, 2-D graphics API that provides high performance and high quality rendering for 2-D geometry, bitmaps, and text. The Direct2D API is designed to interoperate well with Direct3D and GDI. DirectWrite provides support for high-quality text rendering, resolution-independent outline fonts, and full Unicode text and layout support. DXGI 1.1 builds on DXGI 1.0 and adds several new features including support for Direct3D 10.1 command-based remoting and support for synchronized shared surfaces.
XNA Math provides developers a cross-platform native-code method of generating SIMD instructions without having to resort to special case code. Based on the Xbox 360 SDK's Xbox math library, this set of headers supports the most common vectorized math operations used in graphics and animation. The implementation supports Windows 32-bit (x86) and Windows 64-bit (x64) targets using SSE2 intrinsics, and is fully cross-platform with the optimized Xbox 360 XDK version.
This release includes several improvements to XAudio2, xAPO, and xWMA.
