Comments on: A demonstration that Direct2D is patently ridiculous.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 23:26:04 +0000

Yes. Direct2D is terrible. You would be much better off using something like SDL2, for example, especially because it’s portable to other operating systems.

By: Andreas

Andreas — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 17:07:45 +0000

Please show me a code comparison of text-rendering with Direct3D versus text rendering with Direct2D + DirectWrite.
Thanks.

By: Matze

Matze — Sat, 18 Jan 2014 20:37:43 +0000

Nowadays applications MUST be DPI-aware.

Therefore Direct2D is way better than DirectX, since it supports vectorized graphics.

I think you missed this very important point in your article.

By: Tom Kirby-Green

Tom Kirby-Green — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 08:38:45 +0000

I’m very interested to know if you still feel this was about Direct 2D Jonathan. What would you use for 2D, particularly for desktop based games (not WinRT) in 2013?

By: johnathon

johnathon — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 14:33:11 +0000

The fact remains that there is NO cross platform accelerated vector graphics API’s out there for UI developers that are 1. Open Source, 2. GPL licensed or 3. MIT licensed. Direct 2D is an Excellent API for those of us that do not do 3D graphics. Compared to GDI ( in which you have to do resource management ), Direct 2D with a ComPtr class ( easy to roll your own or if you are using Visual Studio professional to build windows apps for sale (like you should) you have ATL’s CComPtr ) is easy to set up, and use. Speed wise? On windows 7 it’s slightly faster than gdi, which is CONSIDERABLY faster than gdi+. With Windows 8 it’s improved, and give it some time as you had to do with Direct 3D and it’ll be on par for good use. Coverage wise? It’s available on Windows Vista platform update, along with a plethora of technologies that were made available with Windows 7. Will it ever be ported to XP? Highly doubtful, as the hardware vendors will not support that platform. Pick up the newest NVidia or ATI card and see if you can find XP drivers for it. Enough said. Code wise? It’s lightweight COM. Meaning it’s an extremely stripped down Com. With proper design you never even have to call QueryInterface(). Of course you know this already, as it’s the same lightweight com that you use for Direct 3D.

Honestly, the ability to make a fluid anti-aliased UI that customers are increasingly demanding is there with Direct 2D. And the why the api was designed for cross compatibility within the Microsoft ecosystem was THE best move they made with the api. It allows older GDI based code to be piece mail migrated to Direct 2D. It also allows Direct 3D developers to use it for 2D graphics in a much more natural way than having to go through the loops of changing the perspective to just draw the 2d portion of the UI.

I know everyone loves to rant about Microsoft, and as a large part of our code base was written to be cross platform, I get to read a lot of rants in the comments in the code. Some are funny, and I agree with, and some are just plain opinion.

Tell you what.. Make a Direct 3D program that draws an anti-aliased rounded rectangle, fills it with a pleasing color gradient, and do hit testing on it, is as few a lines as what Direct 2D can. THEN come back and make a widely read blog post ranting about Direct 2D, or OpenGL. Something tells me (IMHO my own experience) you wont.

I’ll say this much though. The Minute a good OpenGL c++ library becomes publicly available I’ll jump on it like white on rice. Until then, when on a MS system, Direct 2D it is!

By: Emory

Emory — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:13:10 +0000

Have you seen the changes for Windows 8? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh780340(v=vs.85).aspx

“In order to create these Direct2D objects, you must have a Direct3D 11 device , a DXGI device, and a DXGI swap chain.”

I just wanted to play with ID2D1Bitmap1::Map, urgh.

By: Tony Teveris

Tony Teveris — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:25:02 +0000

So Brett can you point to some sample code? Looking for WPF/Direct2D code sample.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 14:24:16 +0000

“Direct2D is excellent — especially for .NET Developers who have had to cope with a less-than-ideal Managed DirectX”

So you’re saying it’s allright to develop a needlessly complicated direct2d API, just as long as it somewhat fixes another needlessly complicated framework of .NET?

Not being able to use directx the relatively easier way from .NET just shows one of .NET’s weaknesses. Desgining a Direct2D API just for that is not a solution, but rather allowing a continuation of the troubled .NET situation.

By: NuShrike

NuShrike — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 03:30:41 +0000

Irrelevant strawman comparison. What is the BINARY size difference between these two files? Benchmarks of speed?

Just counting the source-lines says nothing about the resulting program after compile-time transformations and optimizations.

Example: STL is HUGE but can compile to a tiny binary vs hand-coding a similar data-structure in C. And, you know STL is already well-debugged.

By: Fabritzio

Fabritzio — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 05:47:20 +0000

Giuliano, don’t worry, the author of this article and several commentators are just ignorant. Anyone doing this article would have read the most basic d2d information and seen that it’s built on top of dx10, not 9… The reason this article used directx9 instead of 10 is because they know that if they had used 10 it would have been longer and more complex than d2d.