it sure can, oh, and OGL FTW! 
XSI supports DirectX, but switching realtime mode to dx will cause your move/scale/rotate gizmo disappear. Funny 
…and it needs extra nodes in shader editor (even using OpenGL for realtime!) which are complety separate from shader nodes producing the rendered properties of the given material.
directX isn’t cross platform anyway- and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. OpenGL is “underneath” all the UI code of blender- replacing it, or adding to it probably isn’t very simple- doing it just to work around a driver bug for one platform for one card isn’t a good reason… better bug nvidia to fix their bugs 
I have used blender dual monitor with ogl on linux/nvidia - so it’s nothing to do with openGL itself.
Maya 8 has a Direct3d viewport renderer. You have to compile it yourself though. It’s not useful for modeling or anything really.
Hello,
@Jean: I had both a good master and a good training.
A quickie since I’ve got other things to do:
It’s not about directX being not cross platform, proprietary or anything. What I see is that a lot of games rely on DirectX and that the biggies (Maya, Max, XSI) offer the directX view to help the game deloppers. I think that offering a sort of DirectX snapshot of the scene as a Python extension, non-GPL if required, with progressively more and nore advanced features like shading languages and such, is pretty much a logical step of the game oriented aspect of Blender.
By using python, there’s no need to do ANYTHING to Blender’s source code. And who knows, it may help improve even more Blender’s visibility!
On my part, I know quite some python, but no directX. But if I find some time I’ll dive into the directX-python bindings and try to understand.Hehe, and as I see it, not much will be disappointed if nothing comes out ever hehehe 
Dani
i do have to admit you have a very strong point there. 
though the python errr… plugin(?)-system-thingy would probably only be use to winows users then(im guessing) 
Yes, that is indeed a good point, and a very sad one…
I really wish the gaming industry wouldn’t use DX over OGL 
But that is most likely because of funds or pressure, and just because “everyone” does it in the gaming industry.
It’s the same with OpenGL and the graphics industry (or has been for a long time).
It just is a standard there.
I truly hope developers see the change that is going on right now.
More and more people are starting to use Linux, because it is just as easy as windows now, and it is free (in most cases), and usually far more powerful.
For most people who have once been to the Linux side, the only reason to keep the windows partition is gaming, because games are programmed for windows, mostly because of the whole DirectX stuff.
Maya 8 has a Direct3d viewport renderer. You have to compile it yourself though. It’s not useful for modeling or anything really.
Turn on high quality rendering in a viewport, and Maya will simply show color, specular and normal map in realtime without any extra setup (even with multiple UV sets). It’s very useful in gamedev, and I really hope that something similar is going to happen to Blender’s OGL viewport (I mean the summer of code progress). Yes, it’s not DirectX…
Can be ODYS game engineused as DirectX viewport? Export of scene and startup of engine can be done by one click, it renders scene from a view of primary camera. Itcan be extended to have some kind of interaction (rotation of view, zoom…).
So could be this an answer?
Hi,
Apparently, the DirectX question stirs folks up a bit.
Actually, I needed to know because the IZ3D stereo LCD monitor can only display stereo for DirectX content.
I have since steered away from the monitor idea in favor of using Blender and a patch for creating an active stereo pair :
http://www.fullspectrumia.com/nerdsofparadise/stb/index.html
I will be using a prism viewer called Pokescope to view the screen. I will be saving a boatload of money this way by foregoing the price of a stereo monitor and fancy card. Hope it works.
Thanks very much for all your input.
I had a dog once…once.