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, meaning that almost everything was predefined, baked into the silicon itself. Lighting equations, texture blending, transformations; it was all at the mercy of the GPU's support. For instance, in lieu of real-time reflections, you'd have environment maps because the GPU itself wasn't able to calculate them dynamically. You were bound by the logic of the hardware, which wasn't very flexible.
