Editing Direct3D (section)

==Direct3D 5.0==
In December 1996, a team in Redmond took over development of the Direct3D Immediate Mode, while the London-based RenderMorphics team continued work on the Retained Mode. The Redmond team added the DrawPrimitive API that eliminated the need for applications to construct execute buffers, making Direct3D more closely resemble other immediate mode rendering APIs such as [[Glide API|Glide]] and [[OpenGL]]. The first beta of DrawPrimitive shipped in February 1997,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://news.microsoft.com/1997/02/18/microsoft-multimedia-developers-convene-for-meltdown-97/|title=Press Release-Microsoft Meltdown (February 1997)|publisher=Microsoft Corporation|date=1997-02-18}}</ref> and the final version shipped with '''DirectX 5.0''' in August 1997.<ref>{{cite web
|url=https://news.microsoft.com/1997/07/22/developers-for-microsoft-directx-convene-for-meltdown-97/ |title=Press Release-Microsoft Meltdown (July 1997)|publisher=Microsoft Corporation|date=1997-07-22}}</ref>

Besides introducing an easier-to-use immediate mode API, DirectX 5.0 added the SetRenderTarget method that enabled Direct3D devices to write their graphical output to a variety of DirectDraw surfaces.<ref>{{cite web
|url=https://www.microsoft.com/msj/0298/primitive.aspx|title=Get Fast and Simple 3D Rendering with DrawPrimitive and DirectX 5.0|publisher=Microsoft Systems Journal|author=Ron Fosner}}</ref>