Is the D3DXFragmentLinker going away?

Hello,

I am a developer who has been using the fragment linker quite extensively recently and this news saddens me a bit but also raises my curiosity. I was wondering if you can provide more detail on the optimizations that take place in the effect interface that dont when linking at run time with the fragment linker. I would also be curious in the level of optimization (is it really that much more expensive?) Currently i use the fragment linker for a material editor where the user can select differnt pixel and vertex shader modules to combine into one "effect" so to speak. This flexability is not possible with the effect interface. Currently everything is set up so that materials in the editor can be easily loaded in a game engine with all of the same interfaces / managers etc. I would hate to have to do a rewrite for the engine for optimization and use a totally different system for the editor. You also mention overhead in the driver during create shader. This overhead is on the device regardless right? If the overhead is expensive why not cache handles to the created shader object to use for each material of effect and store them in a manager of some sort? Anyways i hope this question isnt too large ;) but any more details would be greatly appreciated. - Richard Becker

Richard3D at 2007-8-30 >