Every year, Microsoft holds a game developer conference called Meltdown. Hardware companies co-sponsor the conference and deliver presentations showing off their next-generation products and how they will be supported by Microsoft's DirectX API. So if you want to know where future hardware is headed, from AMD to Intel and ATI to NVIDIA, Meltdown is the place to be. But the most exciting parts of Meltdown are when Microsoft details the features they intend to include in the next or next-next version of DirectX. These features tell where the future of 3D games and business graphics are headed and where the hardware designers can tread freely.

Chances are that if some swell new feature is implemented into hardware but support is not included in DirectX, that feature will die an ugly death. Therefore savvy hardware companies wait until a feature is adopted and implemented into DirectX before releasing new hardware that supports it fully – it's sort of a chicken and egg thing with a rooster thrown in. Microsoft has been known to change directions on how a feature eventually gets implemented, leaving early hardware (and developers) high and dry.

But without the hardware, DirectX can't take advantage of the feature, without DirectX the developer can't get his game to run on all the different hardware platforms and without developer support that lovely, capable hardware with its wonderful DirectX API just sits on the shelf looking really expensive.

So here is an overview of the major new additions possibly coming for DirectX 8 that Microsoft and others spoke about. These features are not all necessarily going to make it into DX8. Microsoft takes input from manufacturers and developers into account and changes their plans periodically. But here is what we heard about and saw at Meltdown 2000 for DirectX 8.