Guard band clipping is a technique used by digital rendering hardware and software designed to significantly reduce time and bandwidth required to render an image by rejecting parts of the world geometry that fall outside the guard band. Guard band clipping is supported by current versions of DirectX and is being used by most modern video games and 3D applications.
Retrieving information about a device driver
Since guard band clipping is fully supported by DirectX and the Windows Driver Model, it is easy for a developer to query a device's guard band clipping settings without knowledge of any hardware specific commands.
The following code snippet retrieves the offset of the guard band and displays them on a dialog box:
// ... Device creation ... - renderingDevice is assumed to be the name of the Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D.Device which is queried.
MessageBox.Show ("Top margin: " + renderingDevice.DeviceCaps.GuardBandTop.ToString());
MessageBox.Show ("Left margin: " + renderingDevice.DeviceCaps.GuardBandLeft.ToString());
MessageBox.Show ("Right margin: " + renderingDevice.DeviceCaps.GuardBandRight.ToString());
MessageBox.Show ("Bottom margin: " + renderingDevice.DeviceCaps.GuardBandBottom.ToString());
'' // ... Device disposal ...