Vincent Scheib discusses how to implement command buffers (essentially, OpenGL display lists) on DirectX 9 and 10. He notes that DirectX 11 will have display list support in the API, but if you don’t want to wait 4+ years for general adoption of that API, consider Emergent’s method. By having various threads generate command buffers and a single thread executing these, they are able to take advantage of multiple cores. On a dual core they show x1.4 to x1.9 speedup with multiple threads. Best of all, they provide open source for their system, with a very liberal license.

I am happy to see that PDFs of articles in recent issues of the journal of graphics tools are now available online, free to current subscribers.

I’ll be adding this one to the portal and resources page: sets of charts listing the capabilities of professional graphics cards.