The December 2004 Update of the Microsoft DirectX SDK is finally here.

What?s New in this Release:

New Samples
Updated PRTDemo (formally known as PRTPerVertex) to support LDPRT and Transfer visualization
LocalDeformablePRT
Install on Demand for Games
Gaming with Limited-User Accounts

Tool Updates

PIX
A collection of countersets is provided as a starting point for you to record useful runtime data from your application.
A new Key Combination trigger is provided.
Options are available to display PIX information on top of your running application.
You can set a call capture action on a single frame.
Full stream capture performance is improved.
You can launch experiment and log files, or open image files, simply by dragging them onto a PIX window.

Maya
The Effect File Exporter for Alias Maya now supports options to control the set of exported data, and it can export and preview smooth skinned meshes

D3DX

Tangent Frame Computation
New functionality for robust, customizable, tangent-frame computation.
Precomputed Radiance Transfer

The precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) application programming interface (API) has been enhanced:
Added support for adaptive subsurface scattering simulations.
Added a new callback for retreiving the status of CPCA compression.
Added new methods to enable PRT computation for arbitrary point/normal pairs in space.
Developers can now specify minimum and maximum distances of intersection between objects for PRT simulation.

Effects

A series of performance enhancements and optimizations have been implemented in the Effects framework.

DirectX 9.0 SDK December 2004 Update