Irrlicht Engine

The d3d10 driver should provide the shaders. Whether this means one huge shader or many small ones, doubling all the code or linking many small fragments would be at least in the beginning just a matter of taste.
Having an unoptimized driver is probably better than having none, so the question how to batch GUI elements might be interesting, but not first priority.

Revan1985, you might want to learn some basics of programming and tools first. Working with the latest Irrlicht code requires SVN, too, just get in touch with it.

hybrid wrote:Whether this means one huge shader or many small ones, doubling all the code or linking many small fragments would be at least in the beginning just a matter of taste.

So do you want to mimic fixed functionality, or would you prefer a deferred renderer with alpha blending workarounds?

Yes, I'd do a fixed function emulation of some kind. Simply because I don't know shaders that well and would do the most straight forward approach.

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Nate_D wrote:Sorry if im missing something here, but what exactly will Direct X 10 give you that Direct X 9 wont? I mean you can have the same post processing effects in DX9 (SSAO, Volumetric Light Scattering, DOF) that you can in DX10... Its not like switching to DX10 will increase the quality of your artwork...

DX10 most certainly won't increase the quality of your artwork, but it is supposed to increase the speed with which you can present that artwork, allowing you to increase either the amount of artwork you use or how many effects you choose to enable.

DX10 does give you a slew of things that DX9 can't do without increasing the batch count. DX10 reduces the call overhead for certain aspects as well. It also provides a lot of other things, but those wouldn't be accessible anyways with Irrlicht unless the DX9 counterpart was implemented.

The way I see it, just stick with DX9 for now. There should be no urgent rush to get to DX10.