After three months of intense development, I'm really excited to announce the availability of SharpDX 1.0 , a new platform independent .Net managed DirectX API, directly generated from DirectX SDK headers.
This first version can be considered as stable. The Direct3D10 / Direct3D10.1 API has been entirely tested on a large 3D engine that was using previously SlimDX (thanks patapom!). Migration was quite straightforward, with tiny minor changes to the engine's code.
The key features and benefits of this new API are:
- API is generated from DirectX SDK headers : meaning a complete and reliable API and an easy support for future API.
- Full support for the following DirectX API:
- Direct3D10
- Direct3D10.1
- Direct3D11
- Direct2D1 (including custom rendering, tessellation callbacks)
- DirectWrite (including custom client callbacks)
- D3DCompiler
- DXGI
- DXGI 1.1
- DirectSound
- XAudio2
- XAPO
- An integrated math API directly ported from SlimMath
- Pure managed .NET API, platform independent : assemblies are compiled with AnyCpu target. You can run your code on a x64 or a x86 machine with the same assemblies, without recompiling your project.
- Lightweight individual assemblies : a core assembly - SharpDX - containing common classes and an assembly for each subgroup API (Direct3D10, Direct3D11, DXGI, D3DCompiler...etc.). Assemblies are also lightweight.
- C++/CLI Speed : the framework is using a genuine way to avoid any C++/CLI while still achieving comparable performance.
- API naming convention mostly compatible with SlimDX API.
- Raw DirectX object life management : No overhead of ObjectTable or RCW mechanism, the API is using direct native management with classic COM method "Release".
- Easily mergeable / obfuscatable : If you need to obfuscate SharpDX assemblies, they are easily obfusctable due to the fact the framework is not using any mixed assemblies. You can also merge SharpDX assemblies into a single exe using with tool like ILMerge.
Instead of providing a monolithic assembly, SharpDX is providing lightweight individual and interdependent assemblies. All SharpDX assemblies are dependent from the core SharpDX assembly. You just need to add the required assemblies to your project, without embedding the whole DirectX API stack. Here is a chart that explains SharpDX assembly dependencies:
Next versions will provide support for DirectInput, XInput, X3DAudio, XACT3.
About performance
Someone asked me how SharpDX compares to SlimDX in terms of performance. Here is a micro-benchmark on two methods, ID3D10Device1::GetFeatureLevel (alias Device.FeatureLevel) and ID3D10Device::CheckCounterInfo (alias Device.GetCounterCapabilities).The test consist of 100,000,000 calls on each methods (inside a for, with (10 calls to device.FeatureLevel) * 10,000,000 times) and is repeated 10 times and averaged. Repeated two times.
| Method | SlimDX | SharpDX | SharpDX vs SlimDX |
| device.FeatureLevel | 3700 | 3650 | 1,37% |
| device.GetCounterCapabilities() | 4684 | 4259 | 9,98% |
For FeatureLevel, the test was sometimes around +/-0.5%.
For GetCounterCapabilities(), the main difference between SharpDX and SlimDX implementation is that SlimDX perform a copy from the native struct to .Net struct while SharpDX is directly passing a pointer to the .Net struct.
This test is of course a micro benchmark and doesn't reflect a real-world usage. Some part of the API could be in favor of SlimDX, but I'm pretty confident that SharpDX is much more consistent in the way structures are passed to the native functions, avoiding as much as possible marshaling structures that doesn't need any custom marshaling (unlike SlimDX that is performing most of a time a marshaling between .Net/Native structure, besides they are binary compatible).
Next?
Finally, I'm going to be able to use this project to make some demos with it! Next target is to develop a XNA like based framework based on SharpDX.Direct3D11.Stay tuned!