It’s difficult to imagine how games would look today without the quiet yet transformative change that data-analytics-id=”inline-link” href=”https://www.tomshardware.com/tag/microsoft” data-auto-tag-linker=”true” data-before-rewrite-localise=”https://www.tomshardware.com/tag/microsoft”>Microsoft brought about in the year 2000. Twenty-five years ago, to this day, data-analytics-id=”inline-link” href=”https://news.microsoft.com/source/2000/11/09/microsoft-announces-release-of-directx-8-0/” target=”_blank” data-url=”https://news.microsoft.com/source/2000/11/09/microsoft-announces-release-of-directx-8-0/” referrerpolicy=”no-referrer-when-downgrade” data-hl-processed=”none”>the company introduced DirectX 8. The release was accompanied by little fanfare, no generation-defining tech demo, but it carried one major breakthrough with it — programmable shaders — which would forever revolutionize the way GPUs render graphics.
Before data-analytics-id=”inline-link” href=”https://www.tomshardware.com/tag/directx” data-auto-tag-linker=”true” data-before-rewrite-localise=”https://www.tomshardware.com/tag/directx”>DirectX 8, graphics cards worked on a fixed-function pipeline,…
