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It’s difficult to imagine how games would look today without the quiet yet transformative change that Microsoft brought about in the year 2000. Twenty-five years ago, to this day, the company introduced DirectX 8. The release was accompanied by little fanfare, no generation-defining tech demo, but it carried one major breakthrough with it — programmable shaders — which would forever revolutionize the way GPUs render graphics.
Before DirectX 8, graphics cards worked on a fixed-function pipeline,…
