DirectXTex and DirectXMesh now support Direct3D 12

direct3d, github

Originally posted to Chuck Walbourn's Blog on MSDN, Feb 01, 2017

As part of my multi-year personal project of providing open source replacements for the deprecated D3DX library once found in the legacy DirectX SDK, two libraries are focused on content creation tools and build pipelines. DirectXTex handles loading image files, texture processing including format conversion, mipmap generation, block-compression, and writing out ‘fully cooked’ textures into DDS files. DirectXMesh provides geometry support such as computing normals and tangent-frames, transparent vertex cache optimization, and provides utilities for extracting/inserting vertex data in vertex buffers.

These libraries were originally written for DirectX 11, and it seems likely that most tools should continue to use DirectX 11 for the simplicity and ease of developer productivity. There are, however, cases where you want to use some of this functionality ‘in-engine’, so the January 2017 releases include DirectX 12 API support as well.

DirectXTex January 2017 release on GitHub

DirectXMesh January 2017 release on GitHub

To simplify supporting all the various platforms and Windows SDK combinations, the library continues to default to using DirectX 11. If you want to use DirectX 12, you need to explicitly include the required headers before including the library header:

#include <d3d12.h>
#include "DirectXTex.h"

You also need to link with the DirectXTex_Desktop_2015_Win10.vcxproj, DirectXTex_Windows10.vcxproj, or DirectXTex_XboxOneXDK_2015.vcxproj projects which build with both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 support.

If you want to use both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 in the same compilation module, then you need to explicitly include both:

#include <d3d11_1.h>
#include <d3d12.h>
#include "DirectXTex.h"

The story is similar for DirectXMesh, although in this case it’s just to let you use D3D12_ input layouts enums and structures instead of D3D11_–the data itself is identical.

In case you missed it, DirectXTex was updated to support the HDR (RGBE) file format as a source for floating-point HDR texture data, as well as having ‘opt-in’ support for OpenEXR. For more details on how to enable OpenEXR, see this page.

Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK blog