title: Direct3D

text: Two versions of this API were released. Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in February 1995, bringing Keondjian on board to implement a 3D graphics engine for Windows 95. The first version of Direct3D shipped in DirectX 2.0 (June 2, 1996) and DirectX 3.0 (September 26, 1996).


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D initially implemented an "immediate mode" 3D API and layered upon it a "retained mode" 3D API. Both types of API were already offered with the second release of Reality Lab before Direct3D was released. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw, both were based on COM. The retained mode API was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold a significant volume, "Lego Island" and "Lego Rock Raiders", were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode API after DirectX 3.0.


title: Direct3D

text: For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by the hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were considered extremely awkward to program at the time, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D)


title: Direct3D

text: Rather than adopt OpenGL as a gaming API, Microsoft chose to continue improving Direct3D, not only to be competitive with OpenGL, but to compete more effectively with other proprietary APIs such as 3dfx's Glide.


title: Direct3D

text: From the beginning, the immediate mode also supported Talisman's tiled rendering with the BeginScene/EndScene methods of the IDirect3DDevice interface.


title: Direct3D

text: No substantive changes were planned to Direct3D for DirectX 4.0, which was scheduled to ship in late 1996 and then cancelled.


title: Direct3D

text: 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 and OpenGL. The first beta of DrawPrimitive shipped in February 1997, and the final version shipped with DirectX 5.0 in August 1997.


title: Direct3D

text: 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.


title: Direct3D

text: DirectX 6.0 (released in August, 1998) introduced numerous features to cover contemporary hardware (such as multitexture and stencil buffers) as well as optimized geometry pipelines for x87, SSE and 3DNow! and optional texture management to simplify programming. Direct3D 6.0 also included support for features that had been licensed by Microsoft from specific hardware vendors for inclusion in the API, in exchange for the time-to-market advantage to the licensing vendor. S3 texture compression support was one such feature, renamed as DXTC for purposes of inclusion in the API. Another was TriTech's proprietary bump mapping technique. Microsoft included these features in DirectX, then added them to the requirements needed for drivers to get a Windows logo to encourage broad adoption of the features in other vendors' hardware.


title: Direct3D

text: A minor update to DirectX 6.0 came in the February, 1999 DirectX 6.1 update. Besides adding DirectMusic support for the first time, this release improved support for Intel Pentium III 3D extensions.


title: Direct3D

text: A confidential memo sent in 1997 shows Microsoft planning to announce full support for Talisman in DirectX 6.0, but the API ended up being cancelled (See the Microsoft Talisman page for details).


title: Direct3D

text: DirectX 7.0 (released in September, 1999) introduced the .dds texture format and support for transform and lighting hardware acceleration (first available on PC hardware with Nvidia's GeForce 256), as well as the ability to allocate vertex buffers in hardware memory. Hardware vertex buffers represent the first substantive improvement over OpenGL in DirectX history. Direct3D 7.0 also augmented DirectX support for multitexturing hardware, and represents the pinnacle of fixed-function multitexture pipeline features: although powerful, it was so complicated to program that a new programming model was needed to expose the shading capabilities of graphics hardware.


title: Direct3D

text: DirectX 8.0, released in November, 2000, introduced programmability in the form of vertex and pixel shaders, enabling developers to write code without worrying about superfluous hardware state. The complexity of the shader programs depended on the complexity of the task, and the display driver compiled those shaders to instructions that could be understood by the hardware. Direct3D 8.0 and its programmable shading capabilities were the first major departure from an OpenGL-style fixed-function architecture, where drawing is controlled by a complicated state machine. Direct3D 8.0 also eliminated DirectDraw as a separate API. Direct3D subsumed all remaining DirectDraw API calls still needed for application development, such as Present(), the function used to display rendering results.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D was not considered to be user friendly, but as of DirectX version 8.1, many usability problems were resolved. Direct3D 8 contained many powerful 3D graphics features, such as vertex shaders, pixel shaders, fog, bump mapping and texture mapping.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 9.0, released in December 2002, added a new version of the High Level Shader Language support for floating-point texture formats, Multiple Render Targets (MRT), Multiple-Element Textures, texture lookups in the vertex shader and stencil buffer techniques.


title: Direct3D

text: An extension only available in Windows Vista and newer (7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11), called Direct3D 9Ex (previously versioned 9.0L (L - codename Windows Longhorn)), allows the use of the advantages offered by Windows Vista's Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) and is used for Windows Aero. Direct3D 9Ex, in conjunction with DirectX 9 class WDDM drivers allows graphics memory to be virtualized and paged out to system memory, allows graphics operations to be interrupted and scheduled and allow DirectX surfaces to be shared across processes. Direct3D 9Ex was previously known as version 1.0 of Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF).


title: Direct3D

text: Windows Vista includes a major update to the Direct3D API. Originally called WGF 2.0 (Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0), then DirectX 10 and DirectX Next. Direct3D 10 features an updated shader model 4.0 and optional interruptibility for shader programs. In this model shaders still consist of fixed stages as in previous versions, but all stages support a nearly unified interface, as well as a unified access paradigm for resources such as textures and shader constants. The language itself has been extended to be more expressive, including integer operations, a greatly increased instruction count, and more C-like language constructs. In addition to the previously available vertex and pixel shader stages, the API includes a geometry shader stage that breaks the old model of one vertex in/one vertex out, to allow geometry to be generated from within a shader, thus allowing for complex geometry to be generated entirely by the graphics hardware.


title: Direct3D

text: Furthermore, Direct3D 10 dropped support for the retained mode API which had been a part of Direct3D since the beginning making Windows Vista incompatible with 3D games that had used the retained mode API as their rendering engine.


title: Direct3D

text: Unlike prior versions of the API, Direct3D 10 no longer uses "capability bits" (or "caps") to indicate which features are supported on a given graphics device. Instead, it defines a minimum standard of hardware capabilities which must be supported for a display system to be "Direct3D 10 compatible". This is a significant departure, with the goal of streamlining application code by removing capability-checking code and special cases based on the presence or absence of specific capabilities.


title: Direct3D

text: Because Direct3D 10 hardware was comparatively rare after the initial release of Windows Vista and because of the massive installed base of non-Direct3D 10 compatible graphics cards, the first Direct3D 10-compatible games still provide Direct3D 9 render paths. Examples of such titles are games originally written for Direct3D 9 and ported to Direct3D 10 after their release, such as "Company of Heroes", or games originally developed for Direct3D 9 with a Direct3D 10 path retrofitted later during their development, such as "" or "Crysis". The DirectX 10 SDK became available in February 2007.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 10.0 level hardware must support the following features: the ability to process entire primitives in the new geometry-shader stage, the ability to output pipeline-generated vertex data to memory using the stream-output stage, multisampled alpha-to-coverage support, readback of a depth/stencil surface or a multisampled resource once it is no longer bound as a render target, full HLSL integration – all Direct3D 10 shaders are written in HLSL and implemented with the common-shader core, integer and bitwise shader operations, organization of pipeline state into 5 immutable state objects, organization of shader constants into constant buffers, increased number of render targets, textures, and samplers, no shader length limit, new resource types and resource formats, layered runtime/API layers, option to perform per-primitive material swapping and setup using a geometry shader, increased generalization of resource access using a view, removed legacy hardware capability bits (caps).


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 10.1 was announced by Microsoft shortly after the release of Direct3D 10 as a minor update. The specification was finalized with the release of November 2007 DirectX SDK and the runtime was shipped with the Windows Vista SP1, which is available since mid-March 2008.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 10.1 sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, and gives developers more control over image quality. Features include finer control over anti-aliasing (both multisampling and supersampling with per sample shading and application control over sample position) and more flexibilities to some of the existing features (cubemap arrays and independent blending modes). Direct3D 10.1 level hardware must support the following features: Multisampling has been enhanced to generalize coverage based transparency and make multisampling work more effectively with multi-pass rendering, better culling behavior – Zero-area faces are automatically culled; this affects wireframe rendering only, independent blend modes per render target, new sample-frequency pixel shader execution with primitive rasterization, increased pipeline stage bandwidth, both color and depth/stencil MSAA surfaces can now be used with CopyResource as either a source or destination, MultisampleEnable only affects line rasterization (points and triangles are unaffected), and is used to choose a line drawing algorithm. This means that some multisample rasterization from Direct3D 10 are no longer supported, Texture Sampling – sample_c and sample_c_lz instructions are defined to work with both Texture2DArrays and TextureCubeArrays use the Location member (the alpha component) to specify an array index, support for TextureCubeArrays.


title: Direct3D

text: Unlike Direct3D 10 which strictly required Direct3D 10-class hardware and driver interfaces, Direct3D 10.1 runtime can run on Direct3D 10.0 hardware using a concept of "feature levels", but new features are supported exclusively by new hardware which expose feature level 10_1.


title: Direct3D

text: The only available Direct3D 10.1 hardware as of June 2008 were the Radeon HD 3000 series and Radeon HD 4000 series from ATI; in 2009, they were joined by Chrome 430/440GT GPUs from S3 Graphics and select lower-end models in GeForce 200 series from Nvidia. In 2011, Intel chipsets started supporting Direct3D 10.1 with the introduction of Intel HD Graphics 2000 (GMA HD).


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 11 was released as part of Windows 7. It was presented at Gamefest 2008 on July 22, 2008 and demonstrated at the Nvision 08 technical conference on August 26, 2008. The Direct3D 11 Technical Preview has been included in November 2008 release of DirectX SDK. AMD previewed working DirectX11 hardware at Computex on June 3, 2009, running some DirectX 11 SDK samples.


title: Direct3D

text: The Direct3D 11 runtime is able to run on Direct3D 9 and 10.x-class hardware and drivers using the concept of "feature levels", expanding on the functionality first introduced in Direct3D 10.1 runtime. Feature levels allow developers to unify the rendering pipeline under Direct3D 11 API and make use of API improvements such as better resource management and multithreading even on entry-level cards, though advanced features such as new shader models and rendering stages will only be exposed on up-level hardware. There are three "10 Level 9" profiles which encapsulate various capabilities of popular DirectX 9.0a cards, and Direct3D 10, 10.1, and 11 each have a separate feature level; each upper level is a strict superset of a lower level.


title: Direct3D

text: Tessellation was earlier considered for Direct3D 10, but was later abandoned. GPUs such as Radeon R600 feature a tessellation engine that can be used with Direct3D 9/10/10.1 and OpenGL, but it's not compatible with Direct3D 11 (according to Microsoft). Older graphics hardware such as Radeon 8xxx, GeForce 3/4 had support for another form of tesselation (RT patches, N patches) but those technologies never saw substantial use. As such, their support was dropped from newer hardware.


title: Direct3D

text: Microsoft has also hinted at other features such as order independent transparency, which was never exposed by the Direct3D API but supported almost transparently by early Direct3D hardware such as Videologic's PowerVR line of chips.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 11.0 features include: Support for Shader Model 5.0, Dynamic shader linking, addressable resources, additional resource types, subroutines, geometry instancing, coverage as pixel shader input,


title: Direct3D

text: programmable interpolation of inputs, new texture compression formats (1 new LDR format and 1 new HDR format), texture clamps to limit WDDM preload, require 8-bits of subtexel and sub-mip precision on texture filtering, 16K texture limits, Gather4(support for multi-component textures, support for programmable offsets), DrawIndirect, conservative oDepth, Depth Bias, addressable stream output, per-resource mipmap clamping, floating-point viewports, shader conversion instructions, improved multithreading.


title: Direct3D

text: Other notable features are the addition of two new texture compression algorithms for more efficient packing of high quality and HDR/alpha textures and an increased texture cache.


title: Direct3D

text: First seen in the Release Candidate version, Windows 7 integrates the first released Direct3D 11 support. The Platform Update for Windows Vista includes full-featured Direct3D 11 runtime and DXGI 1.1 update, as well as other related components from Windows 7 like WARP, Direct2D, DirectWrite, and WIC.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 11.1 is an update to the API that ships with Windows 8. The Direct3D runtime in Windows 8 features DXGI 1.2 and requires new WDDM 1.2 device drivers. Preliminary version of the Windows SDK for Windows 8 Developer Preview was released on September 13, 2011.


title: Direct3D

text: The new API features shader tracing and HLSL compiler enhancements, support for minimum precision HLSL scalar data types, UAVs (Unordered Access Views) at every pipeline stage, target-independent rasterization (TIR), option to map SRVs of dynamic buffers with NO_OVERWRITE, shader processing of video resources, option to use logical operations in a render target, option to bind a subrange of a constant buffer to a shader and retrieve it, option to create larger constant buffers than a shader can access, option to discard resources and resource views, option to change subresources with new copy options, option to force the sample count to create a rasterizer state, option to clear all or part of a resource view, option to use Direct3D in Session 0 processes, option to specify user clip planes in HLSL on feature level 9 and higher, support for shadow buffer on feature level 9, support for video playback, extended support for shared Texture2D resources, and on-the-fly swapping between Direct3D 10 and 11 contexts and feature levels. Direct3D 11.1 includes new feature level 11_1, which brings minor updates to the shader language, such as larger constant buffers and optional double-precision instructions, as well as improved blending modes and mandatory support for 16-bit color formats to improve the performance of entry-level GPUs such as Intel HD Graphics. WARP has been updated to support feature level 11_1.


title: Direct3D

text: The Platform Update for Windows 7 includes a limited set of features from Direct3D 11.1, though components that depend on WDDM 1.2 – such as feature level 11_1 and its related APIs, or quad buffering for stereoscopic rendering – are not present.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 11.2 was shipped with Windows 8.1. New hardware features require DXGI 1.3 with WDDM 1.3 drivers and include runtime shader modification and linking, Function linking graph(FLG), inbox HLSL compiler, option to annotate graphics commands. Feature levels 11_0 and 11_1 introduce optional support for tiled resources with shader level of detail clamp (Tier2). The latter feature effectively provides control over the hardware page tables present in many current GPUs. WARP was updated to fully support the new features. There is no feature level 11_2 however; the new features are dispersed across existing feature levels. Those that are hardware-dependent can be checked individually via codice_1. Some of the "new" features in Direct3D 11.2 actually expose some old hardware features in a more granular way; for example codice_2 exposes partial support for instancing on feature level 9_1 and 9_2 hardware, otherwise fully supported from feature level 9_3 onward.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 11.X is a superset of DirectX 11.2 running on the Xbox One. It includes some features, such as draw bundles, that were later announced as part of DirectX 12.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 11.3 shipped in July 2015 with Windows 10; it includes minor rendering features from Direct3D 12, while keeping the overall structure of the Direct3D 11.x API. Direct3D 11.3 introduces Shader Model 5.1, optional Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed Unordered Access View Loads, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), optional Standard Swizzle, optional Default Texture Mapping, Conservative Rasterization(out of three tiers), optional Unified Memory Access (UMA) support, and additional Tiled Resources(tier 2)(Volume tiled resources).


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 12 allows a lower level of hardware abstraction than earlier versions, enabling future games to significantly improve multithreaded scaling and decrease CPU utilization. This is achieved by better matching the Direct3D abstraction layer with the underlying hardware, by means of new features such as Indirect Drawing, descriptor tables, concise pipeline state objects, and draw call bundles. Reducing driver overhead is in fact the main attraction of Direct3D 12, similarly to AMD's Mantle; in the words of its lead developer Max McMullen, the main goal of Direct3D 12 is to achieve "console-level efficiency" and improved CPU parallelism.


title: Direct3D

text: Although Nvidia has announced broad support for Direct3D 12, they were also somewhat reserved about the universal appeal of the new API, noting that while game engine developers may be enthusiastic about directly managing GPU resources from their application code, "a lot of [other] folks wouldn't" be happy to have to do that.


title: Direct3D

text: Some new hardware features are also in Direct3D 12, including Shader Model 5.1, Volume Tiled Resources(Tier 2), Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed UAV Load, Conservative Rasterization(Tier 1), better collision and culling with Conservative Rasterization, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), Standard Swizzles, Default Texture Mapping, Swap Chains, swizzled resources and compressed resources, additional blend modes, programmable blend and efficient order-independent transparency (OIT) with pixel ordered UAV.


title: Direct3D

text: Pipeline state objects have evolved from Direct3D 11, and the new concise pipeline states mean that the process has been simplified. DirectX 11 offered flexibility in how its states could be altered, to the detriment of performance. Simplifying the process and unifying the pipelines (e.g. pixel shader states) lead to a more streamlined process, significantly reducing the overheads and allowing the graphics card to draw more calls for each frame.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 12 also learned from AMD Mantle in command lists and bundles, aiming to ensure the CPU and GPU working together in a more balanced manner.


title: Direct3D

text: Within Direct3D 11, the commands are sent from the CPU to the GPU one by one, and the GPU works through these commands sequentially. This means that commands are bottlenecked by the speed at which the CPU could send these commands in a linear fashion. Within DirectX 12 these commands are sent as command lists, containing all the required information within a single package. The GPU is then capable of computing and executing this command in one single process, without having to wait on any additional information from the CPU.


title: Direct3D

text: Within these command lists are bundles. Where previously commands were just taken, used, and then forgotten by the GPU, bundles can be reused. This decreases the workload of the GPU and means repeated assets can be used much faster.


title: Direct3D

text: While resource binding is fairly convenient in Direct3D 11 for developers at the moment, its inefficiency means several modern hardware capabilities are being drastically underused. When a game engine needed resources in DX11, it had to draw the data from scratch every time, meaning repeat processes and unnecessary uses. In Direct3D 12, descriptor heaps and tables mean the most often used resources can be allocated by developers in tables, which the GPU can quickly and easily access. This can contribute to better performance than Direct3D 11 on equivalent hardware, but it also entails more work for the developer.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 12 features explicit multi-adapter support, allowing the explicit control of multiple GPUs configuration systems. Such configurations can be built with graphics adapter of the same hardware vendor as well of different hardware vendor together.


title: Direct3D

text: An experimental support of D3D 12 for Windows 7 SP1 has been released by Microsoft in 2019 via a dedicated NuGet package.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D is a Microsoft DirectX API subsystem component. The aim of Direct3D is to abstract the communication between a graphics application and the graphics hardware drivers. It is presented like a thin abstract layer at a level comparable to GDI (see attached diagram). Direct3D contains numerous features that GDI lacks.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D is an "Immediate mode" graphics API. It provides a low-level interface to every video card 3D function ("transformations, clipping, lighting", "materials", "textures", "depth buffering" and so on). It once had a higher level "Retained mode" component, now officially discontinued.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D immediate mode presents three main abstractions: "devices", "resources" and "Swap Chains" (see attached diagram). "Devices" are responsible for rendering the 3D scene. They provide an interface with different rendering capabilities. For example, the mono device provides white and black rendering, while the RGB device renders in color. There are four types of devices:


title: Direct3D

text: Every device contains at least one "swap chain". A "swap chain" is made up of one or more back buffer surfaces. Rendering occurs in the back buffer.


title: Direct3D

text: Moreover, devices contain a collection of "resources"; specific data used during rendering. Each resource has four attributes:


title: Direct3D

text: The Microsoft Direct3D 11 API defines a process to convert a group of vertices, textures, buffers, and state into an image on the screen. This process is described as a rendering pipeline with several distinct stages. The different stages of the Direct3D 11 pipeline are:


title: Direct3D

text: The pipeline stages illustrated with a round box are fully programmable. The application provides a shader program that describes the exact operations to be completed for that stage. Many stages are optional and can be disabled altogether.


title: Direct3D

text: In Direct3D 5 to 9, when new versions of the API introduced support for new hardware capabilities, most of them were optional – each graphics vendor maintained their own set of supported features in addition to the basic required functionality. Support for individual features had to be determined using "capability bits" or "caps", making cross-vendor graphics programming a complex task.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 10 introduced a much simplified set of mandatory hardware requirements based on most popular Direct3D 9 capabilities which all supporting graphics cards had to adhere to, with only a few optional capabilities for supported texture formats and operations.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 10.1 added a few new mandatory hardware requirements, and to remain compatible with 10.0 hardware and drivers, these features were encapsulated in two sets called "feature levels", with 10.1 level forming a superset of 10.0 level. As Direct3D 11.0, 11.1 and 12 added support for new hardware, new mandatory capabilities were further grouped in upper feature levels.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 11 also introduced "10level9", a subset of the Direct3D 10 API with three feature levels encapsulating various Direct3D 9 cards with WDDM drivers, and Direct3D 11.1 re-introduced a few optional features for all levels, which were expanded in Direct3D 11.2 and later versions.


title: Direct3D

text: This approach allows developers to unify the rendering pipeline and use a single version of the API on both newer and older hardware, taking advantage of performance and usability improvements in the newer runtime.


title: Direct3D

text: Each upper level is a strict superset of a lower level, with only a few new or previously optional features that move to the core functionality on an upper level. More advanced features in a major revision of the Direct3D API such as new shader models and rendering stages are only exposed on up-level hardware.


title: Direct3D

text: Separate capabilities exist to indicate support for specific texture operations and resource formats; these are specified per each texture format using a combination of capability flags.


title: Direct3D

text: Feature levels use underscore as a delimiter (i.e. "12_1"), while API/runtime versions use dot (i.e. "Direct3D 11.4").


title: Direct3D

text: In Direct3D 11.4 for Windows 10, there are nine feature levels provided by structure; levels 9_1, 9_2 and 9_3 (collectively known as Direct3D 10 Level 9) re-encapsulate various features of popular Direct3D 9 cards, levels 10_0, 10_1 refer to respective legacy versions of Direct3D 10, 11_0 and 11_1 reflects the feature introduced with Direct3D 11 and Direct3D 11.1 APIs and runtimes, while levels 12_0 and 12_1 correspond the new feature levels introduced with the Direct3D 12 API.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 12 for Windows 10 requires graphics hardware conforming to feature levels 11_0 and 11_1 which support virtual memory address translations and requires WDDM 2.0 drivers. There are two new feature levels, 12_0 and 12_1, which include some new features exposed by Direct3D 12 that are optional on levels 11_0 and 11_1. Some previously optional features are realigned as baseline on levels 11_0 and 11_1. Shader Model 6.0 has been released with Windows 10 Creators Update and requires Windows 10 Anniversary Update, WDDM 2.1 drivers.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D 12 introduces a revamped resource binding model which allows explicit control of memory. Abstract "resource view" objects are now represented with resource descriptors, which are allocated using memory heaps and tables. Resource Binding tiers define maximum number of resources that can be addressed using CBV (constant buffer view), SRV (shader resource view) and UAV (unordered access view), as well as texture sampler units. Tier 3 hardware allows fully bindless resources only restricted by the size of the descriptor heap, while Tier 1 and Tier 2 hardware impose some limits on the number of descriptors ("views") that can be used simultaneously.


title: Direct3D

text: WDDM driver model in Windows Vista and higher supports arbitrarily large number of execution contexts (or threads) in hardware or in software. Windows XP only supported multitasked access to Direct3D, where separate applications could execute in different windows and be hardware accelerated, and the OS had limited control about what the GPU could do and the driver could switch execution threads arbitrarily.


title: Direct3D

text: The ability to execute the runtime in a multi-threaded mode has been introduced with Direct3D 11 runtime. Each execution context is presented with a resource view of the GPU. Execution contexts are protected from each other, however a rogue or badly written app can take control of the execution in the user-mode driver and could potentially access data from another process within GPU memory by sending modified commands. Though protected from access by another app, a well-written app still needs to protect itself against failures and device loss caused by other applications.


title: Direct3D

text: The OS manages the threads all by itself, allowing the hardware to switch from one thread to the other when appropriate, and also handles memory management and paging (to system memory and to disk) via integrated OS-kernel memory management.


title: Direct3D

text: Finer-grained context switching, i.e. being able to switch two execution threads at the shader-instruction level instead of the single-command level or even batch of commands, was introduced in WDDM/DXGI 1.2 which shipped with Windows 8. This overcomes a potential scheduling problem when application would have very long execution of a single command/batch of commands and will have to be terminated by the OS watchdog timer.


title: Direct3D

text: WDDM 2.0 and DirectX 12 have been reengineered to allow fully multithreaded draw calls. This was achieved by making all resources immutable (i.e. read-only), serializing the rendering states and using draw call bundles. This avoids complex resource management in the kernel-mode driver, making possible multiple reentrant calls to the user-mode driver via concurrent executions contexts supplied by separate rendering threads in the same application.


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D Mobile is derived from Direct3D but has a smaller memory footprint. Windows CE provides Direct3D Mobile support.


title: Direct3D

text: The following alternative implementations of Direct3D API exist. They are useful for non-Windows platforms and for hardware without some versions of DX support:


title: Direct3D

text: Direct3D comes with D3DX, a library of tools designed to perform common mathematical calculations on vectors, matrices and colors, calculating look-at and projection matrices, spline interpolations, and several more complicated tasks, such as compiling or assembling shaders used for 3D graphic programming, compressed skeletal animation storage and matrix stacks. There are several functions that provide complex operations over 3D meshes like tangent-space computation, mesh simplification, precomputed radiance transfer, optimizing for vertex cache friendliness and stripification, and generators for 3D text meshes. 2D features include classes for drawing screen-space lines, text and sprite based particle systems. Spatial functions include various intersection routines, conversion from/to barycentric coordinates and bounding box/sphere generators. D3DX is provided as a dynamic link library (DLL). D3DX is deprecated from Windows 8 onward and can't be used in Windows Store apps.


title: Direct3D

text: Some features present in previous versions of D3DX were removed in Direct3D 11 and now provided as separate sources:


title: Direct3D

text: DXUT (also called the sample framework) is a layer built on top of the Direct3D API. The framework is designed to help the programmer spend less time with mundane tasks, such as creating a window, creating a device, processing Windows messages and handling device events. DXUT have been removed with the Windows SDK 8.0 and now distributed as source via CodePlex.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: Shimmer and Shine is an American animated television series created by Farnaz Esnaashari-Charmatz and produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio. It premiered on Nickelodeon's Nick Jr. block on August 24, 2015, and ran for four seasons. The show is about two genies, Shimmer and Shine, who grant wishes for their human friend Leah.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: The first season is set in the human world and focuses on a young girl named Leah who is friends with a pair of twin genie sisters named Shimmer and Shine. Each day, the genies grant Leah three wishes, but they often make mistakes. Each episode features Leah working together with the genies to resolve the problems they unintentionally cause, all while keeping Shimmer and Shine a secret from her next door neighbor and best friend Zac.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: In the second season, the characters are transported to Zahramay Falls, a magical land where Shimmer and Shine live. Leah reveals her genies' existence to Zac, who is given a genie of his own, named Kaz. Shimmer and Shine continue to grant Leah wishes in Zahramay Falls and befriend the sovereign of the land, Princess Samira. The season includes Samira's pet peacock, Roya and Leah's pet fox, Parisa. Also, Zeta, a villainous sorceress, and finally, Zeta's dragon, Nazboo.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: "Shimmer and Shine" is based on an unreleased pilot that took six months to develop in 2013, with a reported completion date of September 2013. The pilot was created by Farnaz Esnaashari-Charmatz, who previously worked on "Dora the Explorer", with Sindy Boveda Spackman as the writer and Andy Bialk as the art director. It was ordered to series by Nickelodeon in March 2014, with the first season to consist of 20 episodes. The series premiered on August 24, 2015.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: On February 11, 2016, it was announced that "Shimmer and Shine" was renewed for a 20-episode second season that uses CGI animation, with the second season premiering in the United States on June 15, 2016. On June 21, 2016, "Shimmer and Shine" was renewed for a third season of an additional 20 episodes. The third season premiered on May 5, 2017.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: On May 24, 2017, "Shimmer and Shine" was renewed for a fourth season consisting of 20 episodes. The fourth season premiered October 20, 2018. Season 4 was eventually increased to 26 episodes.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: "Shimmer and Shine" premiered on Nick Jr. UK on 9 November 2015, where it was dubbed with British voice actors, replacing the original American soundtrack (though Zeta and the animals' voices remained unchanged).


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: Nickelodeon and Random House Children's Books released books based on the show starting in January 2016.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: Nickelodeon, with Paramount for Region 1 and with Universal / Sony for Region 4, have released a number of DVDs based on the show.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: Nickelodeon, with Paramount for Region 1 and with Universal / Sony for Region 4, released a number of DVDs featuring one episode from a variety of the animated television series they have produced, including "Shimmer & Shine", "Blaze and the Monster Machines", "Blue’s Clues", "Bubble Guppies", "", "The Fresh Beat Band of Spies", "Paw Patrol", "Rusty Rivets", "Sunny Day", "Top Wing" and "Wallykazam!", on average 6 on each DVD.


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: Shimmer and Shine episodes featured as bonus episodes in the DVD releases of other animated television series that Nickelodeon produced, primarily with Universal / Sony for Region 4, including "Paw Patrol" & "Nella the Princess Knight"


title: Shimmer and Shine

text: Nickelodeon and Fisher-Price released a toy line based on the show. Mega Bloks playlets based on the show have been released.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Relations between the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Persian Empire (Iran) officially commenced in 1521, with the Safavids in power. Past and present contact between Russia and Iran have long been complicatedly multi-faceted; often wavering between collaboration and rivalry. The two nations have a long history of geographic, economic, and socio-political interaction. Mutual relations have often been turbulent, and dormant at other times.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: The Russian Empire had an oppressive role in Iran during the 19th and early 20th centuries which harmed Iran's development, and during most of the ensuing Soviet period, the shadow of the "big northern neighbour" continued to impend. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the two neighboring nations have generally enjoyed very close cordial relations. Iran and Russia are strategic allies and form an axis in the Caucasus alongside Armenia. Iran and Russia are also military allies in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq and partners in Afghanistan and post-Soviet Central Asia; and shares a common interest in suppressing Sunni Islamism and pan-Sunni political groups. The Russian Federation is also the chief supplier of arms and weaponry to Iran. Due to Western economic sanctions on Iran, Russia has become a key trading partner, especially in regard to the former's excess oil reserves. Currently Russia and Iran share a close economic and military alliance, and both countries are subject to heavy sanctions by most Western nations.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Militarily, Iran is the only country in Western Asia that has been invited (in 2007) to join the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Russia-based international treaty organization that parallels NATO. As soon as he became President, Vladimir Putin pursued close friendship with Iran and started aligning Russia to the anti-Sunni bloc in the Middle East consisting of Iran, Hezbollah and Ba'athist Syria In 2015 ordered a military intervention in Syria, supporting the Assad regime and its Iranian allies with an aerial bombing campaign against the Syrian opposition. While much of the Iranian military uses Iranian-manufactured weapons and domestic hardware, Iran still purchases some weapons systems from Russia. In turn, Iran assisted Russia with its drone technology and other military technology during its invasion of Ukraine.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Iran has its embassy in Moscow and consulates in the cities of Astrakhan and Kazan. Russia has its embassy in Tehran, and consulates in Rasht and Isfahan.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Contacts between Russians and Persians have a long history, extending back more than a millennium. There were known commercial exchanges as early as the 8th century AD between Persia and Russia. They were interrupted by the Mongol invasions in the 13th and 14th centuries but started up again in the 15th century with the rise of the state of Muscovy. In the 9th–11th century AD, there were repetitive raiding parties undertaken by the Rus' between 864 and 1041 on the Caspian Sea shores of what are nowadays Iran, Azerbaijan, and Dagestan as part of the Caspian expeditions of the Rus'. Initially, the Rus' appeared in Serkland in the 9th century traveling as merchants along the Volga trade route, selling furs, honey, and slaves. The first small-scale raids took place in the late 9th and early 10th century. The Rus' undertook the first large-scale expedition in 913; having arrived on 500 ships, they pillaged the Gorgan region, in the territory of present-day Iran, and the areas of Gilan and Mazandaran, taking slaves and goods.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: It was not until the 16th century that formal diplomatic contacts were established between Persia and Russia, with the latter acting as an intermediary in the trade between England and Persia. Transporting goods across Russian territory meant that the English could avoid the zones under Ottoman and Portuguese control. The Muscovy Company (also known as the Russian Company) was founded in 1553 to expand the trade routes across the Caspian sea. Moscow's role as an intermediary in exchanges between Britain and Persia led Russian traders to set up business in urban centres across Persia, as far south as Kashan. The Russian victories over the Kazan Khanate in 1552 and the Astrakhan Khanate in 1556 by Tsar Ivan IV (r. 1533–84) revived trade between Iran and Russia via the Volga-Caspian route and marked the first Russian penetration of the Caucasus and the Caspian area. Though these commercial exchanges in the latter half of the 16th century were limited in scope, they nonetheless indicate that the fledgling entente between the two countries emerged as a result of opposition to the neighboring Ottoman Empire.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Diplomatic relations between Russia and Iran date back to 1521, when the Safavid Shah Ismail I sent an emissary to visit the Czar Vasili III. As the first diplomatic contacts between the two countries was being established, Shah Ismail was also working hard with the aim of joining forces against their mutual enemy, neighboring Ottoman Turkey. On several occasions, Iran offered Russia a deal exchanging a part of its territory (for example Derbent and Baku in 1586) for its support in its wars against their Ottoman archrivals. In 1552–53, Safavid Iran and the Muscovy state in Russia exchanged ambassadors for the first time, and, starting in 1586, they established a regular diplomatic relationship. In 1650, extensive contact between the two people, culminated in the Russo-Persian War (1651–53), after which Russia had to cede its footholds in the North Caucasus to the Safavids. In the 1660s the famous Russian Cossack "ataman" Stenka Razin raided, and occasionally wintered at, Persia's north coast, creating diplomatic problems for the Russian Czar in his dealings with the Persian Shah. The Russian song telling the tragic semi-legendary story of Razin's relationship with a Persian princess remains popular to this day.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Peace reigned for many decades between the two peoples after these conflicts, in which trade and migration of peoples flourished. The decline of the Safavid and Ottoman state saw the rise of Imperial Russia on the other hand. After the fall of Shah Sultan Husayn brought the Safavid dynasty to an end in 1722, the greatest threats facing Persia were Russian and Ottoman ambitions for territorial expansion in the Caspian region—north-western Persia specifically. During the Safavid period, Russian and Persian power was relatively evenly balanced.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Overall, the common anti-Ottoman struggle served as the main common political interest for Iran and Russia throughout the period of Safavid rule, with several attempts to conclude an anti-Ottoman military treaty. Following Shah Husayn's fall, the relationship lost its symmetry, but it was largely restored under Nader Shah.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In his later years of rule, Peter the Great found himself in a strong enough position to increase Russian influence more southwards in the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, challenging both the Safavids and the Ottomans. He made the city of Astrakhan his base for his hostilities against Persia, created a shipyard, and attacked the weakened Safavids in the Russo-Persian War (1722–1723), capturing many of its territories in the Caucasus and northern mainland Iran for several years. After several years of political chaos in Persia following the fall of the Safavids, a new and powerful Persian empire was born under the highly successful military leader Nader Shah. Fearing a costly war which would most likely be lost against Nader and also being flanked by the Turks in the west, the Russians were forced to give back all territories and retreat from the entire Caucasus and northern mainland Iran as according to the Treaty of Resht (1732) and Treaty of Ganja (1735) during the reign of Anna of Russia. The terms of the treaty also included the first instance of close Russo-Iranian collaboration against a common enemy, in this case the Ottoman Turks. Relations sooned soured, however, after Nader Shah accused the Russians of conspiring against him. The invasion of Dagestan in 1741 was partially directed against Russia; thus the Terek River was left on a high state of alert until Nader Shah's death.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Karim Khan Zand promised the Russians certain territories in the northern frontier if they helped him against enemies like the Ottomans.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Irano-Russian relations particularly picked up again following the death of Nader Shah and the dissolution of his Afsharid dynasty which gave eventually way to the Qajarid dynasty in the mid-18th century. The first Qajar Persian Ambassador to Russia was Mirza Abolhassan Khan Ilchi. After the rule of Agha Mohammad Khan, who stabilized the nation and re-established Iranian suzerainty in the Caucasus, the Qajarid government was quickly absorbed with managing domestic turmoil, while rival colonial powers rapidly sought a stable foothold in the region. While the Portuguese, British, and Dutch competed for the south and southeast of Persia in the Persian Gulf, the Russian Empire largely was left unchallenged in the north as it plunged southward to establish dominance in Persia's northern territories. Plagued with internal politics, the Qajarid government found itself incapable of rising to the challenge of facing its northern threat from Russia.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: A weakened and bankrupted royal court, under Fath Ali Shah, was forced to sign the notoriously unfavourable Treaty of Gulistan (1813) following the outcome of the Russo-Persian War (1804–1813), irrevocably ceding what is modern-day Dagestan, Georgia, and large parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) was the outcome of the Russo-Persian War (1826–1828), which resulted in the loss of modern-day Armenia and the remainder of the Azerbaijan Republic, and granted Russia several highly beneficial capitulatory rights, after efforts and initial success by Abbas Mirza failed to ultimately secure Persia's northern front. By these two treaties, Iran lost swaths of its integral territories that had made part of the concept of Iran for centuries. The area to the north of the Aras River, which included the territories of the contemporary nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the North Caucasian Republic of Dagestan, were Iranian territory until they were occupied by Russia in the course of the 19th century.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Anti-Russian sentiment was so high in Persia during that time that uprisings in numerous cities were formed. The famous Russian intellectual, ambassador to Persia, and Alexander Pushkin's best friend, Alexander Griboyedov, was killed along with hundreds of Cossacks by angry mobs in Tehran during these uprisings.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: With the Russian Empire still advancing south in the course of two wars against Persia, and the treaties of Turkmanchay and Golestan in the western frontiers, plus the unexpected death of Abbas Mirza in 1823, and the murder of Persia's Grand Vizier ("Mirza AbolQasem Qa'im Maqām"), Persia lost its traditional foothold in Central Asia. The Treaty of Akhal, in which the Qajarid's were forced to drop all claims on Central Asia and parts of Turkmenistan, topped off Persian losses to the global emerging power of Imperial Russia.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In the same period, by a proposal of the Shah with the backing of the Tsar, the Russians founded the Persian Cossack Brigade, which and would prove to be crucial in the next few decades of Iranian history and Irano-Russian relations. The Persian Cossacks were organized along Russian lines and controlled by Russian officers. They dominated Tehran and most northern centers of living. The Russians also organized a banking institution in Iran, which they established in 1890.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: During the 19th century, Russians dealt with Iran as an inferior "Orient", and held its people in contempt whilst ridiculing all aspects of Iranian culture. The Russian version of contemporaneous Western attitudes of superiority differed however. As Russian national identity was divided between East and West and Russian culture held many Asian elements, Russians consequently felt equivocal and even inferior to Western Europeans. In order to stem the tide of this particular inferiority complex, they tried to overcompensate to Western European powers by overemphasizing their own Europeanness and Christian faith, and by expressing scornfully their low opinion of Iranians. The historian Elena Andreeva adds that this trend was not only very apparent in over 200 Russian travelogues written about Iran and published in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but also in diplomatic and other official documents.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In 1907, Russia and Britain divided Iran into three segments that served their mutual interests, in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. The Russians gained control over the northern areas of Iran, which included the cities of Tabriz, Tehran, Mashad, and Isfahan. The British were given the southeastern region and control of the Persian Gulf, and the territory between the two regions was classified as neutral territory.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Russia's influence in northern Iran was paramount from the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During this time period, it stationed troops in Iran's Gilan, Azerbaijan and Khorasan provinces, and its diplomatic offices (consulates) in these parts wieleded considerable power. These consulates dominated the local Iranian administration and in some circumstances even collected local taxes. Starting in the same year as the Anglo-Russian Convention, unpremeditated Russian colonization commenced in Mazandaran and Astarabad provinces. Then, in 1912, Russian foreign policy officially adopted the plan to colonize northern Iran. At the outbreak of World War I, there were most likely some 4,000 Russian settlers in Astarabad and Mazandaran, whereas in northeastern Iran the Russians had founded a minimum of 15 Russian villages.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: During the reign of Nicholas II of Russia, Russian occupational troops played a major role in the attempted Tsarist suppression of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. In the dawn of the outbreak of World War I, Russian occupational forces occupied Qajar Iran's Azerbaijan province as well as the entire north and north-east of the country, and amounted to circa twenty thousand. Following the start of the Persian Campaign of World War I, the number of Russian troops in Iran moderately grew to some eighty or ninety thousand.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: As a result of the major Anglo-Russian influence in Iran, at a high point, the central government in Tehran was left with no power to even select its own ministers without the approval of the Anglo-Russian consulates. Morgan Shuster, for example, had to resign under British and Russian diplomatic pressure on the Persian government. Shuster's book "The Strangling of Persia: Story of the European Diplomacy and Oriental Intrigue That Resulted in the Denationalization of Twelve Million Mohammedans" is an account of this period, criticizing the policies of Russian and Britain in Iran.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: These, and a series of climaxing events such as the Russian shelling of Mashad's Goharshad Mosque in 1911, and the shelling of the Persian National Assembly by the Russian Colonel V. Liakhov, led to a surge in widespread anti-Russian sentiments across the nation.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: One result of the public outcry against the ubiquitous presence of Imperial Russia in Persia was the Constitutionalist movement of Gilan, which followed up the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. Many participants of the revolution were Iranians educated in the Caucasus, direct émigrés (also called Caucasian muhajirs) from the Caucasus, as well as Armenians that at the same period were busy with establishing the Dashnaktsutyun party as well as operations directed against the neighboring Ottoman Empire. The rebellion in Gilan, headed by Mirza Kuchak Khan led to an eventual confrontation between the Iranian rebels and the Russian army, but was disrupted with the October Revolution in 1917.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: As a result of the October Revolution, thousands of Russians fled the country, many to Persia. Many of these refugees settled in northern Persia creating their own communities of which many of their descendants still populate the country. Some notable descendants of these Russian refugees in Persia include the political activist and writer Marina Nemat and the former general and deputy chief of the Imperial Iranian Air Force Nader Jahanbani, whose mother was a White émigré.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Russian involvement however continued on with the establishment of the short-lived Persian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1920, supported by Azeri and Caucasian Bolshevik leaders. After the fall of this republic, in late 1921, political and economic relations were renewed. In the 1920s, trade between the Soviet Union and Persia reached again important levels. Baku played a particularly significant role as the venue for a trade fair between the USSR and the Middle East, notably Persia.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In 1921, Britain and the new Bolshevik government entered into an agreement that reversed the division of Iran made in 1907. The Bolsheviks returned all the territory back to Iran, and Iran once more had secured navigation rights on the Caspian Sea. This agreement to evacuate from Iran was made in the Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship (1921), but the regaining of Iranian territory did not protect the Qajar dynasty from a sudden "coup d'état" led by Colonel Reza Shah.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In the 1920s-1930s, the Soviet secret service (Cheka-OGPU-NKVD) carried out clandestine operations on Iranian soil as it tried to eliminate White émigrées that had moved to Iran. In 1941, as the Second World War raged, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom launched an undeclared joint invasion of Iran, ignoring its plea of neutrality.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In a revealing cable sent on July 6, 1945, by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the local Soviet commander in northern Azerbaijan was instructed as such:


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: After the end of the war, the Soviets supported two newly formed in Iran, the Azerbaijan People's Government and the Republic of Mahabad, but both collapsed in the Iran crisis of 1946. This postwar confrontation brought the United States fully into Iran's political arena and, with Cold War starting, the US quickly moved to convert Iran into an anti-communist ally.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: The Soviet Union was the first state to recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran, in February 1979. During the Iran–Iraq War, however, it supplied Saddam Hussein with large amounts of conventional arms. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini deemed Islam principally incompatible with the communist ideals (such as atheism) of the Soviet Union, leaving the secular Saddam as an ally of Moscow. However, during the war, the USA imposed an arms embargo on Iran, and the Soviet Union supplied arms to Iran via North Korea.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: After the war, in 1989, Iran made an arms deal with Soviet Union. With the fall of the USSR, Tehran–Moscow relations experienced a sudden increase in diplomatic and commercial relations, and Russia soon inherited the Soviet-Iranian arms deals. By the mid-1990s, Russia had already agreed to continue work on developing Iran's nuclear program, with plans to finish constructing the nuclear reactor plant at Bushehr, which had been delayed for nearly 20 years.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: During the East Prigorodny conflict, and Georgian–Ossetian conflict, Iran secretly supported Ossetian separatism against Georgia, and sided with the Ossetians against Ingush and Chechens in the conflict.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: As tension between the United States and Iran escalates, the country is finding itself further pushed into an alliance with Russia, as well as China. Iran, like Russia, "views Turkey's regional ambitions and the possible spread of some form of pan-Turkic ideology with suspicion".


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Prior to the Iranian revolution Iran's air fleet was entirely Western-made but in the 21st century Iran's Air Force and civilian air fleet are increasingly becoming domestically and Russian built as the US and Europe continue to maintain sanctions on Iran.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In May 2007 Iran was invited to join the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Russia-based international treaty organization that parallels NATO. The invitation came from the desk of then CSTO Secretary-General Nikolai Bordyuzha, who said that "the CSTO is an open organization. If Iran applies in accordance with our charter, we will consider the application." It was stated by a Western observer that the accession failed "basically due to the ayatollahs’ opposition to join a military bloc clearly dominated by a traditionally rival power of Iran such as Russia." Another Western observer points out that, like NATO, CSTO has a mutual defense treaty clause whereby attack against one is considered an attack against all and was concerned about the difficulty posed by a possible conflagration of the Iran-Israel variety. In November 2014 Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki head Sergey Naryshkin floated the idea of admitting Iran as an observer to the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In 2010, Iran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment led the UN to pass a new resolution, number 1929 to vote for new sanctions against Iran which bans the sale of all types of heavy weaponry (including missiles) to Iran. This resulted in the cancellation of the delivery of the S-300 system to Iran: In September 2010 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree banning the delivery of S-300 missile systems, armored vehicles, warplanes, helicopters and ships to Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticised Russia for kowtowing to the United States. As a result of the cancellation, Iran brought suit against Russia in Swiss court and in response to the lawsuit Russia threatened to withdraw diplomatic support for Iran in the nuclear dispute.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Iran and Russia have become the Syrian government's principal allies in the conflict, openly providing armed support. Meanwhile, Russia's own relations with the West plummeted due to the Russo-Ukrainian War, the 2018 Skripal poisoning incident in Great Britain, and alleged Russian interference with Western politics, prompting the U.S. and Europe to retaliate with sanctions against Russia. As a result, Russia has shown a degree willingness to ally with Iran militarily. Following the JCPOA agreement, President Vladimir Putin lifted the S-300 ban in 2015 and the deal for the missile defense system to Iran was revived. The delivery was completed in November 2016 and was to be followed by a $10 billion deal that included helicopters, planes and artillery systems.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In January 2021 Iran, China and Russia held their third joint naval exercise, the third joint exercise of the three countries, in the northern Indian Ocean and the Sea of Oman area. The joint exercise of the three countries began in 2019 in the Indian Ocean. According to the United States, Russia sought to acquire drones from Iran during the Russo-Ukrainian War, with a Russian delegation visiting Kashan Airfield south of Tehran in June and July 2022 to observe drones manufactured by Iran. Iran criticized the assessment by the United States, saying that it would not supply Russia or Ukraine with military equipment during the war, instead demanding that both nations seek a peaceful resolution. In September 2022, the Ukrainian military claimed that it encountered an Iranian-supplied suicide drone used by Russia, publishing images of the wreckage of the drone. On October 6, 2022, Iran agreed to provide "additional" surface to air missiles and drones to Russia. On October 24, 2022, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said Iran would "not remain indifferent" if it is "proven that Iranian drones are being used in the Ukraine war against people," but claimed defense cooperation between Iran and Russia would continue.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Russia and Iran also share a common interest in limiting the political influence of the United States in Central Asia. This common interest has led the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to extend to Iran as observer status in 2005, and offer full membership in 2006. The Iranians attained full membership status on 17 September 2021. Moscow and Beijing supported Tehran's successful bid for full membership in the SCO.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In addition to their trade and cooperation in hydrocarbons, Iran and Russia have also expanded trade ties in many non-energy sectors of the economy, including a large agriculture agreement in January 2009 and a telecommunications contract in December 2008. In July 2010, Iran and Russia signed an agreement to increase their cooperation in developing their energy sectors. Features of the agreement include the establishment of a joint oil exchange, which with a combined production of up to 15 million barrels of oil per day has the potential to become a leading market globally. Gazprom and Lukoil have become increasingly involved in the development of Iranian oil and gas projects.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In 2005, Russia was the seventh largest trading partner of Iran, with 5.33% of all exports to Iran originating from Russia. Trade relations between the two increased from US$1 billion in 2005 to $3.7 billion in 2008. Motor vehicles, fruits, vegetables, glass, textiles, plastics, chemicals, hand-woven carpet, stone and plaster products were among the main Iranian non-oil goods exported to Russia.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In 2014, relations between Russia and Iran increased as both countries are under U.S. sanctions and were seeking new trade partners. The two countries signed a historic US$20 billion oil for goods deal in August 2014.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: President Ebrahim Raisi, who was elected in 2021, seemed to prioritize trade with Russia. In early 2022, Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Russia at the invitation of his Russian counterpart. He handed over Iran's proposed draft for a 20-year cooperation agreement between Iran and Russia during his trip.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: With the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by Russia, the U.S. and other nations have imposed sanctions on Russia. In the opinion of at least one Western writer, in order to evade sanctions, Iran and Russia could be working together to create a "clandestine banking and finance system to handle tens of billions of dollars in annual trade banned under U.S. led sanctions."


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: On 20 March 2022 it was reported that Iran, in the person of Agriculture Minister Javad Sadatinejad, had signed a deal in Moscow with Russia to import 20 million tons of basic goods including vegetable oil, wheat, barley and corn.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In May 2022 Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak and Iranian Oil Minister Javad Owji, joint co-chairs of the Russian-Iranian intergovernmental commission had a meeting in Tehran at which they discussed such items as oil swaps, increasing joint investments, a possible free trade zone, adding to the Russian-built Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, and developing the long-delayed North-South Transport Corridor, a rail cargo route from all the way from Russia to India, among other items.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran on 19 July, 2022 to meet with his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish president was previously involved to mediate in the 2022 Ukraine conflict. The three nations have been holding talks in recent years as part of the so-called "Astana peace process" to end more than 11 years of civil war in Syria. Iran and the Russian Federation attempt to boost economic ties after being hit by Western sanctions.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: As Iran and Russia economic and geo-political relations have improved over the years, Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) have opted for Iran to join the EEU as well. Currently, only one EEU country, Armenia, shares a land border with Iran, but the Caspian Sea provides a direct link between Iran and Russia.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Iran has expressed interest in joining the EEU. A meeting between Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was held in 2015 to discuss the prospect of cooperation between the customs union and Iran. According to the Iranian Ambassador to Russia, Mehdi Sanaei, Iran is focusing on signing an agreement with the EEU in 2015 regarding mutual trade and reduction of import tariffs to central Asian countries and trading in national currencies as part of the agreement rather than in US dollars.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: In May 2015, the Union gave the initial go-ahead to signing a free trade agreement with Iran. Andrey Slepnev, the Russian representative on the Eurasian Economic Commission board, described Iran as the EEU's "key partner in the Middle East" in an expert-level EEU meeting in Yerevan. Viktor Khristenko furthermore noted that Iran is an important partner for all the EEU member states. He stated that "Cooperation between the EEU and Iran is an important area of our work in strengthening the economic stability of the region".


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: Both Russia and Iran are subject to Western sanctions, and each extended period of sanctions seems to improve the relationship between them. This, however, has changed somewhat following the imposition of sanctions against both Russia and Iran. Improving the countries’ respective ties with the US proved more difficult than forging closer ties between Moscow and Tehran. Since March 2014, In response to Russia's annexation of Crimea and the purposeful destabilization of Ukraine, the EU, the US, and a number of other Western nations have gradually adopted restrictive sanctions against Russia. In retaliation, Russia imposed its own restrictions on Western nations, prohibiting the import of some food items. In November 2018, The JCPOA-lifted Iran sanctions were entirely reinstated by the Trump administration.


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: According to 2015 data from Pew Research Center, 54% of Russians have a negative opinion of Iran, with 34% expressing a positive opinion. According to a 2013 BBC World Service poll, 86% of Russians view Iran's influence positively, with 10% expressing a negative view. A Gallup poll from the end of 2013 showed Iran ranked as sixth greatest threat to peace in the world according to Russian view (3%), after United States (54%), China (6%), Iraq (5%), and Syria (5%).


title: Iran–Russia relations

text: According to a December 2018 survey by IranPoll, 63.8% of Iranians have a favorable view of Russia, with 34.5% expressing an unfavorable view.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Contemporary worship music (CWM), also known as praise and worship music, is a defined genre of Christian music used in contemporary worship. It has developed over the past 60 years and is stylistically similar to pop music. The songs are frequently referred to as "praise songs" or "worship songs" and are typically led by a "worship band" or "praise team", with either a guitarist or pianist leading. It has become a common genre of music sung in many churches, particularly in charismatic or non-denominational Protestant churches with some Roman Catholic congregations incorporating it into their mass as well.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: In the early 1950s, the Taizé Community in France started to attract youths from several religious denominations with worship hymns based on modern melodies.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: In the mid-20th century, Christian Unions in university environments hosted evangelistic talks and provided biblical teaching for their members, Christian cafés opened with evangelistic aims, and church youth groups were set up. Amateur musicians from these groups began playing Christian music in a popular idiom. Some Christians felt that the church needed to break from its stereotype as being structured, formal and dull to appeal to the younger generation. By borrowing the conventions of popular music, the antithesis of this stereotype, the church restated the claims of the Bible through Christian lyrics, and thus sent the message that Christianity was not outdated or irrelevant. "The Joystrings" were one of the first Christian pop groups to appear on television, in Salvation Army uniform, playing Christian beat music.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Churches began to adopt some of these songs and the styles for corporate worship. These early songs for communal singing were characteristically simple. "Youth Praise", published in 1966, was one of the first and most famous collections of these songs and was compiled and edited by Michael Baughen and published by the Jubilate Group.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: As of the early 1990s, songs such as "Lord, I Lift Your Name on High", "Shine, Jesus, Shine" and "Shout to the Lord" had been accepted in many churches. Integrity Media, Maranatha! Music and Vineyard were already publishing newer styles of music. Supporters of traditional worship hoped the newer styles were a fad, while younger people cited , "Sing to the Lord a new song". Prior to the late 1990s, many felt that Sunday morning was a time for hymns, and young people could have their music on the other six days. A "modern worship renaissance" helped make it clear any musical style was acceptable if true believers were using it to praise God. The changes resulted from the "Cutting Edge" recordings by the band Delirious?, the Passion Conferences and their music, the Exodus project of Michael W. Smith, and the band Sonicflood. Contemporary worship music became an integral part of Contemporary Christian music.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: More recently songs are displayed using projectors on screens at the front of the church, and this has enabled greater physical freedom, and a faster rate of turnover in the material being sung. Important propagators of CWM over the past 25 years include Vineyard Music, Hillsong Worship, Bethel Music, Elevation Worship, Jesus Culture and Soul Survivor.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: As CWM is closely related to the charismatic movement, the lyrics and even some musical features reflect its theology. In particular the charismatic movement is characterised by its emphasis on the Holy Spirit, through a personal encounter and relationship with God, that can be summed up in agape love.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Lyrically, the informal, sometimes intimate, language of relationship is employed. The terms 'You' and 'I’ are used rather than 'God' and 'we', and lyrics such as, 'I, I'm desperate for You', and 'Hungry I come to You for I know You satisfy, I am empty but I know Your love does not run dry' both exemplify the similarity of the lyrics of some CWM to popular love songs. Slang is used on occasion (for example 'We wanna see Jesus lifted high') and imperatives ('Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, I want to see You'), demonstrating the friendly, informal terms charismatic theology encourages for relating to God personally. Often a physical response is included in the lyrics ('So we raise up holy hands'; 'I will dance, I will sing, to be mad for my king'). This couples with the use of drums and popular rhythm in the songs to encourage full body worship.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: The metaphorical language of the lyrics is subjective, and therefore does risk being misinterpreted; this emphasis on personal encounter with God does not always balance with intellectual understanding.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Just as in secular, popular and rock music, relationships and feelings are central topics, so in CWM, association to a personal relationship with God and free expression are emphasised.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: As in traditional hymnody, some images, such as captivity and freedom, life and death, romance, power and sacrifice, are employed to facilitate relationship with God.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Beginning in the 2010s, contemporary worship music with a distinctly theological lyric focus blending hymns and worship songs with contemporary rhythms & instrumentation, began to emerge, primarily in the Baptist, Reformed, and more traditional non-denominational branches of Protestant Christianity. Artists in the "modern hymn movement" include well-known groups such as modern hymn-writers, Keith & Kristyn Getty, and Sovereign Grace Music as well as others including Matt Papa, Enfield (Hymn Sessions), and Aaron Keyes. By the late 2010s, the format had gained sizable traction in many churches and other areas in culture as well as being heard in CCM collections and musical algorithms on several internet streaming services.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Because, in common with hymns, such music is sung communally, there can be a practical and theological emphasis on its accessibility, to enable every member of the congregation to participate in a corporate act of worship. This often manifests in simple, easy to learn melodies, in a mid-vocal range, repetition, familiar chord progressions and a restricted harmonic palette. Unlike hymns, the music notation may primarily be based around the chords, with the keyboard score being secondary.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: At more charismatic services, members of the congregation may harmonise freely during worship songs, perhaps singing in tongues (see glossolalia), and the worship leader seeks to be 'led by the Holy Spirit'. There may also be role of improvisation, flowing from one song to the next and inserting musical material from one song into another.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: There is no fixed band set-up for playing CWM, but most have a lead singer and lead guitarist or keyboard player. Their role is to indicate the tone, structure, pace and volume of the worship songs, and perhaps even construct the order or content during the time of worship. Some larger churches are able to employ paid worship leaders, and some have attained fame by worship leading, blurring contemporary worship music with Christian rock, though the role of the band in a worship service, leading and enabling the congregation in praise normally contrasts that of performing a Christian concert. In CWM today there will often be three or four singers with microphones, a drum kit, a bass guitar, one or two guitars, keyboard and possibly other, more orchestral instruments, such as a flute or violin. There has been a shift within the genre towards using amplified instruments and voices, again paralleling popular music, though some churches play the same songs with simpler or acoustic instrumentation.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Technological advances have played a significant role in the development of CWM. In particular the use of projectors means that the song repertoire of a church is not restricted to those in a song book. Songs and styles go in trends. The internet has increased accessibility, enabling anyone to see lyrics and guitar chords for many worship songs, and download MP3 tracks. This has also played a part in the globalisation of much CWM. Some churches, such as Hillsong, Bethel and Vineyard, have their own publishing companies, and there is a thriving Christian music business which parallels that of the secular world, with recording studios, music books, CDs, MP3 downloads and other merchandise. The consumer culture surrounding CWM has prompted both criticism and praise, and as Pete Ward deals with in his book "Selling Worship", no advance is without both positive and negative repercussions.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Criticisms include Gary Parrett's concern that the volume of this music drowns out congregational participation, and therefore makes it a performance. He quotes Ephesians 5:19, in which Paul the Apostle tells the church in Ephesus to be 'speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit', and questions whether the worship band, now so often amplified and playing like a rock band, replace rather than enable a congregation's praise.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Seventh-day Adventist author Samuele Bacchiocchi expressed concerns over the use of the "rock" idiom, as he argues that music communicates on a subconscious level, and the often anarchistic, nihilistic ethos of rock stands against Christian culture. Using the physical response induced by drums in a worship context as evidence that rock takes peoples' minds away from contemplating on the lyrics and God, he suggests that rock is actively dangerous for the Church.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: The theological content too has raised questions for some, including Martyn Percy, who argues there is too great an emphasis on a very intimate relationship with God, using terms such as 'I' and 'you' instead of 'we' and 'God', and very passionate, physical language, and argues that this bias needs urgent correction. He explains how the emphasis on emotion can encourage hype and a need to create an atmosphere which evokes a sense of encounter with God, rather than allowing God to do so.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Despite the biblical basis employed to underpin CWM, such as , its surrounding culture tends to exclude systematic use of the psalms in weekly worship, sidelining lament from regular worship practice. The emphasis on praise, and on an interpretation of 'worship' that is overwhelmingly positive, can lead to avoidance of the psalms of lament. Michael Vasey writes: "Scripture is, of course, full of lament – and devotes its finest literary creation to warning the godly against quick and easy answers. The power of many of the psalms we are embarrassed to use lies precisely here. Of all this there is little echo in our contemporary reading." Whereas denominational churches generally use a weekly lectionary that gives a broad range of scriptural themes, including selected psalms on those themes, CWM churches tend not to have an agreed lectionary and the consequent agreement on using a broad range of material.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Pope John Paul II, concerning the role of music in regard to worship, wrote, "today, as yesterday, musicians, composers, liturgical chapel cantors, church organists and instrumentalists must feel the necessity of serious and rigorous professional training. They should be especially conscious of the fact that each of their creations or interpretations cannot escape the requirement of being a work that is inspired, appropriate and attentive to aesthetic dignity, transformed into a prayer of worship when, in the course of the liturgy, it expresses the mystery of faith in sound."


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Some have noted that contemporary worship songs often reflect the social climate of individualism as the lyrics emphasize personal relationship with God, even within a group context.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Interviewed in "Christianity Today" in 2011, Grove City College professor T. David Gordon said contemporary music was not easier to sing or better than traditional music, but familiar. If this style of music was all people listened to, then that would make them happy. He also said praise bands had a hard time finding good music, but played the contemporary music because the church wanted it, with the only criteria being how contemporary the music sounded. Gordon also said churches were adding hymns to contemporary services, but that in the past the main concern had never been how new the music sounded.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Gordon said in 2014 that contemporary music could not be as good because one generation could not compete with 50 generations of hymns, and even the contemporary songs were in some cases just the old hymns with an updated sound. Writers of new songs had a hard time with "theologically sound, but significant, profound, appropriate, memorable, and edifying". After his 2011 interview, Gordon said Mark Moring of "Christianity Today" had observed that contemporary music in churches was on the decline. Gordon said the people who first wanted it are older, and contemporary music had become so common that it was no longer a marketing tool, and no longer new when people wanted what was new. Praise teams, Gordon said, were like performers, but that they were in conflict with what the Bible said. And the congregation needed to participate.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Some songs now appear in more traditional hymnals. "Evangelical Lutheran Worship" (published in 2006 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) includes "Lord, I Lift Your Name on High" by Rick Founds and "Shout to the Lord" by Darlene Zschech. The "United Methodist Hymnal" (1989) includes "Thy Word Is a Lamp" by Amy Grant and "Take Our Bread" by Joe Wise.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: Contemporary Christian worship groups, such as Hillsong United, are ranking in the top ten on "Billboard" and other national charts and are earning publicity in pop culture publications.


title: Contemporary worship music

text: In 2019, the U.S. radio network Air1 (which was previously devoted to Christian hits) changed its format to focus primarily on worship music.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton is a city in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States; the population is 105,643 as of the 2020 United States Census. Along with Plymouth, it is one of the two county seats of Plymouth County. It is the sixth-largest city in Massachusetts and is sometimes referred to as the "City of Champions", due to the success of native boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler, as well as its successful Brockton High School sports programs. Two villages within it are Montello and Campello, both of which have MBTA Commuter Rail Stations and post offices. Campello is the smallest neighborhood, but also the most populous. Brockton hosts a baseball team, the Brockton Rox. It is the second-windiest city in the United States, with an average wind speed of .


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: In 1649, Ousamequin (Massasoit) sold the surrounding land, then known as Saughtucket, to Myles Standish as an addition to Duxbury. Brockton was part of this area, which the English renamed Bridgewater. On June 15, 1821, a portion of the then Bridgewater Township was established as North Bridgewater. Its name changed in 1874, after a contentious process finally decided on naming it after Isaac Brock (the initial British commanding general at Queenston Heights, where invading American troops suffered a rout, in 1812), after a local merchant heard of Brockville, Ontario, on a trip to Niagara Falls. Brockton became a city on April 9, 1881. During the American Civil War, Brockton was America's largest producer of shoes, and until the latter parts of the 20th century, Brockton had a large shoe and leather products industry.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Since the company's 1898 founding, Brockton has been the headquarters city of office supplies retailer W.B. Mason, itself founded to provide those supplies to the city's shoe industry.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and (0.56%) is water. Brockton is the 162nd largest city by land area in the Commonwealth, and the twelfth largest of the twenty-seven towns in Plymouth County. Brockton is bordered by Stoughton to the northwest, Avon to the north, Holbrook to the northeast, Abington to the northeast, Whitman and East Bridgewater to the southeast, West Bridgewater to the south, and Easton to the west. Brockton is approximately 25 miles south of Boston, and 30 miles northeast of Providence, Rhode Island.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton is mostly an urban setting, lying along the Salisbury Plain River, which once powered the many shoe factories of the city. To the northeast lies the Beaver Brook Conservation Land, attached to the southern end of the Ames Nowell State Park in Abington. There are several parks throughout the city, but the largest is D.W. Field Park, an Olmsted-inspired park which includes ponds, Waldo Lake and Brockton Reservoir in Avon, as well as a golf course.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: As of the census of 2020, there were 105,673 people, 31,440 households, and about 3.04 people living in each household, and about an average family size of 3.59. The population density was 4,486.3 people per square mile. The racial makeup of the city was 27.3% White, 50.9% African American, 0.7% Native American, 2.0% Asian, 0% Pacific Islander, and 2.2% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 11.9% of the population. The African-American population in Brockton has grown significantly since the beginning of the early 2000s.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton has one of the largest population of Cape Verdean ancestry in the United States, with about 9% of its population. Brockton also reportedly has one of the largest communities of Angolans in the United States.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Statistically, Brockton is the most populous and most densely populated community in Plymouth County. It is the sixth largest community in the commonwealth. However, it is only the twenty-seventh most densely populated community in the Commonwealth.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: As of 2010, there were 33,675 households, out of which 35.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 42.0% were married couples living together, 19.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 32.4% were non-families. 26.6% of all households were made up of individuals, and 9.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. In the city, the population was spread out, with 27.8% under the age of 18, 9.1% from 18 to 24, 30.5% from 25 to 44, 20.8% from 45 to 64, and 11.7% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females, there were 92.1 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 87.4 males.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: As of 2018, the median income for a household in Brockton is $55,140. Males have an average income of $41,093 versus $35,145 for females. The per capita income for the city was $17,163. The poverty rate in Brockton is 15.61% of the population. Notably by race, 23.55% of Hispanics were in poverty, while the Black population of Brockton had about 18.61% of its population living in poverty.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton is home to the Brockton Symphony Orchestra, a community orchestra founded in 1948. The orchestra performs five or six concerts per season at local venues such as Brockton's West Middle School Auditorium and the Oliver Ames Auditorium in the neighboring town of Easton. The orchestra comprises 65 musicians from the greater Brockton area and its musical director since 2007 is James Orent, a guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: The city supports three buildings within the Brockton Public Library system. The main library is a Carnegie building.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Based at Campanelli Stadium the Brockton Rox play in the Futures Collegiate Baseball League (FCBL). From 2003 through 2011 the team was a member of the independent professional Can-Am League but in 2012 decided to join the amateur FCBL. Collegiate players on FCBL teams, who are looking for more experience and scouting exposure, are offered non-paid playing opportunities.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: On the national level, Brockton is a part of Massachusetts's 8th congressional district, and has been represented since January 2013 by Stephen Lynch.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: On the state level, Brockton is represented in three districts in the Massachusetts House of Representatives: the Ninth Plymouth, Tenth Plymouth (which includes West Bridgewater and Precinct 1 of East Bridgewater), and the Eleventh Plymouth (which includes most of Easton). The city is represented in the Massachusetts Senate as a part of the Second Plymouth and Bristol district, which includes Halifax, Hanover, Hanson, Whitman and portions of East Bridgewater and Easton


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton has a city government led by a mayor and city council. The city elects a mayor for two-year terms. Previous mayors include Winthrop H. Farwell Jr., John T. Yunits Jr., David Crosby, Carl Pitaro, Richard L. Wainwright, John E. Sullivan, Alvin Jack Sims, Joseph H. Downey and Paul Studenski. James Harrington was elected mayor in 2005 and began his term in January 2006. He was re-elected on November 6, 2007, for another two-year term. He had previously served 16 years as a City Councilor. In the fall of 2009, City Councilor Linda Balzotti defeated Harrington to become the city's first female mayor. Balzotti was defeated in 2013 by Bill Carpenter who won the election by only 44 votes. After the unexpected death of Bill Carpenter on July 3, 2019, City Councillor President Moises Rodrigues become the acting Mayor. On July 15, 2019 Rodrigues was unanimously elected by the 11-person City Council to become the Mayor of Brockton. Rodrigues became the first person of color to become Mayor of Brockton after serving six years on the Brockton city council. In 2009, community activist Jass Stewart was elected to councilor-at-large becoming the first African American to serve in Brockton's city council. The city council consists of four Councilors-at-Large and seven ward Councilors, one for every ward in the city. As of January 2020, the mayor of Brockton is Robert F. Sullivan.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton operates its own school system for the city's approximately 17,000 students. There is an early education school (Barrett Russell), ten elementary schools (Angelo, Arnone, Baker, Brookfield, Downey, George, Gilmore, Hancock, John F. Kennedy and Raymond), the Davis K–8 school, six middle/junior high schools (North, East, West, South, Ashfield and the Plouffe Academy), Brockton High School and four alternative schools (Huntington, Edison, Champion and B.B. Russell). Brockton High School's athletics teams are called the Boxers (after the city's undefeated heavyweight boxing champion, Rocky Marciano).


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton was home to three parochial schools (Sacred Heart, Saint Casimir and Saint Edward) which merged in 2007 to form two schools. Trinity Lower Campus at the former Saint Edwards school site, and Trinity Upper Campus located on the former site of the Saint Colman's school, one Christian school (South Shore Christian and the Brockton Christian School closed in 2010), and Cardinal Spellman High School, a Catholic high school named for Francis Cardinal Spellman, Brockton area native and former Archbishop of New York. Students may also choose to attend tuition-free Southeastern Regional Vocational Technical High School (in South Easton).


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton is the site of Massasoit Community College and offers Adult Studies/LEAD classes in Brockton.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Massachusetts Route 24, a six-lane divided motorway, passes through the west side of the city, with exits at Route 27 to the north and Route 123 to the south. The two routes pass through the center of the city, crossing at that point. Massachusetts Route 28 passes from north to south through the center of the city, The western end of Route 14 (at its intersection with Route 27) and the southern end of Route 37 (at its intersection with Route 28) both are in the city.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton has its own bus services, operated by the Brockton Area Transit Authority (BAT). Each bus has a designated route running through a section of Brockton, i.e. Montello, Campello, Cary Hill, etc. There are also buses that have routes outside the city, i.e., Bridgewater Industrial Park, Ashmont Station (MBTA subway end-of-line), Stoughton and a connecting bus stop in Montello to the Braintree Station (MBTA subway end-of-line).


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: The Middleborough/Lakeville Line of the MBTA's commuter rail system bisects the city running north-south, with stops in the Montello and Campello neighborhoods, as well as in the city center, providing service to points south and South Station in Boston north of the city.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton has three hospitals: Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital on the east side, Good Samaritan Medical Center—a Steward Family Hospital (formerly Caritas Good Samaritan, and before that Cardinal Cushing) Hospital to the northwest, and the Brockton Veterans Administration Hospital to the southwest. The VA Hospital is the sponsoring institution for the Harvard South Shore Psychiatry program. It serves as a teaching facility for residents of various medical specialties from Boston University, physician assistant students from Northeastern University, nursing students from the University of Massachusetts Boston and physician assistant and pharmacy students from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton has a community health center that serves individuals with low income and poor access to health care at Brockton Neighborhood Health Center.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: The city of Brockton is protected around the clock by 174 paid, professional firefighters of the city of Brockton Fire Department. The Brockton Fire Department currently operates out of six fire stations, located throughout the city, and maintains a fire apparatus fleet of five engines, three ladders, one squad, one tactical rescue unit and several other special, support, and reserve units. The fire department does not provide EMS services; ambulance coverage is handled by Brewster Ambulance.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: In 1905, local newspapers recounted many heroic acts by Brockton firefighters during the Grover Shoe Factory disaster. On March 10, 1941, thirteen Brockton firefighters died when the roof collapsed as they were fighting a fire at the Strand Theatre. That fire resulted in one of the worst firefighting tragedies in American history.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: The City of Brockton Police Department has roughly 181 sworn members and 31 non-sworn employees. The officers are assigned to the Patrol Division, and Operations Division which includes; Detectives, Narcotics, Gang Unit, Special Weapons And Tactics, K-9, Quality of Life, GREAT Program, Elderly Affairs, and Community Education Units. In addition, the city is patrolled by the Fourth (Middleborough) Barracks of Troop D of the Massachusetts State Police. Brockton also has several citizen anti-crime groups, including the Guardian Angels and Operation Archangel.


title: Brockton, Massachusetts

text: Brockton was named one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People in the United States in 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 by the America's Promise Alliance.


title: Radio Man

text: Radio Man (or Radioman) (born 1951) is the nickname of a formerly homeless man in New York City who has become widely known from making over 100 cameo appearances in films and TV shows. His real name is Craig Castaldo (though he also goes by Craig Schwartz), but he is known as "Radio Man" due to the radio he often wears around his neck.


title: Radio Man

text: He has made cameos in the TV series "30 Rock" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and in the films "The Departed", "Shutter Island", "Just My Luck", "Romance & Cigarettes", "Elf", "Two Weeks Notice", "Glitter", "Keeping the Faith", "Godzilla", "Ransom", "Big Daddy", "Mr. Deeds", "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", "The Other Woman", "The Bourne Trilogy", and other films and television shows.


title: Radio Man

text: He is famous in New York and has been written about in "The New York Times" and the New York "Daily News". Whoopi Goldberg took him to the Oscars as her guest one of the years she hosted.