DirectX 9 or DirectX 10 for starters?

Question

I want to do projects to make my resume more appealing to game companies. So I am going to start buying books. But I don\'t know rather to read DirectX 9 or 10 api books to

Answer 1

Fact is, you need to learn both.

As long as 50% of gamers are still on WinXP, you're going to need to be able to program in Direct3D9.

D3D9 isn't any easier to get started with than D3D10/11. Its the same principles, with vertices to be placed, normals to be calculated, and meshes to be rendered. Whether you're creating a ID3D11BlendState structure or calling IDirect3DDevice9::SetRenderState(), its the same concept, just different ways of doing it.

After working with d3d11 a couple of days, I've come to think of it as better than DX9 in a lot of ways. For one, you're able to use the full caps of the GPU including geometry shaders. 2nd, it forces you to fully understand the graphics pipeline to even draw anything (note how functions are named after the stage of the pipeline they affect: here: (IA* fcns: input-assembler stage, OM* fcns: output-merger stage etc) ). This may result in a slightly larger INITIAL startup curve, but once you get it, its not any harder than D3D9 and is better, since the very naming of the functions helps concepts stick.

So get going on both, and learning them in tandem may help reduce the amount of effort you spend learning deprecated API's/methods of doing things from DX9 (ie you really want to spend more time using shaders, and don't use the fixed function pipeline section of DX9 too much).