compnerd / DXSample

DXSample

This sample application shows how to use Swift, Swift/COM to build an application which leverages DirectX 12 on Windows 10.

This sample is a proof of concept of the possible functionality but does not follow many best graphics best practices. This code eschews V-Sync support for simplicity in the code, doing simple double buffering. There are many math routines which are transliterated from the DXMath library by Microsoft. It also does not try to optimize the math routines, opting instead for simplicity in the code. Many pieces of trivial functionality, e.g. fullscreen support, are simply discarded for brevity.

Build Requirements

• Latest Swift Development Snapshot (2021-02-18 or later)¹
• Windows SDK 10.0.107763 or newer
• Windows 10

¹ Stable releases are not currently supported as they are built from release branches and this project requires the latest development snapshot from the main branch.

Building

This project requires the latest Swift snapshot (February 18, 2021 or newer). You can use the snapshot binaries from swift.org or download the nightly build from Azure.

Building the Demo

Simply running the demo, as described below, will implicitly build the demo program. However, should you wish to explicitly build the demo application you can do so as:

swift build

Running the Demo

With SPM, you can simply run the target demo program. Because there is only a single executable in the repository, you can simply run it using the following:

swift run

Debugging

Debugging this demo is complicated as there are separate portions involved:

1. Swift application code
2. System integration for DirectX

LLDB currently does not support debugging with PDBs very well and does not have the same level of conveniences that WinDBG may support. Depending on which portion is being debugged you may have better experiences with different debugging approaches.

For debugging the Swift application code, it is easier to debug using LLDB and DWARF. In such a case, you will need to build the application as follows to enable the debug information:

swift build -Xlinker -debug:dwarf

For debugging the DirectX support, the WinDBG support may be more convenient. In such a case, it would be better to build the application with CodeView and PDBs to allow WinDBG to provide stack traces in addition to the additional information from the debug mode. You can build that using the following command:

swift build -Xswiftc -g -Xswiftc -debug-info-format=codeview -Xlinker -debug

When the demo application is built in the Debug configuration, additional debugging features are enabled in DirectX. This will include halting execution on any warning from the execution of the DirectX pipeline.