The DirectX® Team is pleased to announce the release of DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (Summer 2003) - RC0.
As a valued DirectX Beta Participant we ask that you immediately install the SDK and review its contents and report any bugs you find. Reporting bugs is critical to the releases" success. We have a very short review period between now and the final release of SDK. This will be your last and final opportunity to point out any problems with this release. Please take the time now to provide your bugs and feedback, so we may ship a Final Release without delay. Additionally, if you are shipping a title for Christmas this year, we strongly urge you to validate the redist as soon as possible.
The DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (Summer 2003) contains updated versions of the D3DX library. The new features contained are support for shader model 2.0 with capability bits on, and new animation system updates. The support for shader model 2 allows the High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) to enable flow control via predication to reduce the amount of instructions needed to run advanced shaders. For information on what is supported in shader model 2.0, refer to the updated DirectX 9.0 SDK reference documentation. The animation system adds functionality for looping, callback functions, event querying, and more advanced animation cloning functionality.