Microsoft obsolated Execute-buffer rendering with Dx7.... why?

quote: Taken from MSDN Dx SDK Docs Execute-buffer rendering, and the following related structures, is considered obsolete with DirectX 7.0. For information about these structures, see the documentation provided with a previous release of DirectX. Legacy documentation is provided with this SDK and is available for download from http://www.microsoft.com/directx. D3DBRANCH D3DEXECUTEBUFFERDESC D3DEXECUTEDATA D3DINSTRUCTION D3DLINE D3DMATRIXLOAD D3DMATRIXMULTIPLY D3DPICKRECORD D3DPOINT D3DPROCESSVERTICES D3DSPAN D3DSTATUS D3DTEXTURELOAD D3DTRIANGLE

When Execute Buffers were the only way to do things, a LOT of people complained - they aren''t easy concepts to grasp, and they certainly did wonders for the growth of OpenGL as a gaming platform! [Carmack''s original decision to use GL for Quake followed him researching early Direct3D, IIRC]. DrawPrimitive and related calls are generally considered more intuitive, so MS focussed on them.

That''s like saying ''Pointers are hard, let''s not use them anymore...''

How were execure buffers difficult?
You started a list, you twiddled the world matric, some colors, vertices, textures, twiddled the world matrix back and then reused the execute buffer...

You still do the same thing now, you just to build the "buffer" everytime... or is my gl-warped sense of rendering missing something with this Dx thing?

DrawPrimitive.
You can still use execute buffers (that''s the whole point of COM) but.. why would you?

-RWarden (roberte@maui.net)

actually execute buffers suck, just like the early version of D3D. and how do you know what is the optimal size for an execute buffer for every different video card. and OpenGL does have display lists which use this same concept, only better.

Are not display list and execute buffers precisely the same thing?

yeah, the same concept. however, the code that one would write out for execute buffers is not very user friendly. where as the you write to use display lists, is exactly the same as all the other OpenGL code, and much easier.