Direct3D ( the 3D graphics API within DirectX ) is widely used in the development of video games for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360 and some Sega Dreamcast games.

Direct3D is also used by other software applications for visualization and graphics tasks such as CAD / CAM engineering.

When Unreal was finally released, Microsoft's Direct3D API was growing almost exponentially in popularity and Epic was fairly quick to develop a renderer for their game engine.

GPLs lack of inbuilt support for 3D accelerator cards other than those produced by 3dfx and Rendition contributed to a decrease in sales when those cards became obsolete, since at the time there was no Direct3D support.

Developers have been instructed to use textured quads in Direct3D for 2D graphics.

Direct3D is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems ( Windows 95 and above ), and for other platforms through the open source software Wine.

Direct3D also allows applications to run fullscreen instead of embedded in a window, though they can still run in a window if programmed for that feature.

Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the graphics card, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration.

That is, it contains many commands for 3D rendering ; however, since version 8, Direct3D has superseded the old DirectDraw framework and also taken responsibility for the rendering of 2D graphics.

Direct3D offers full vertex software emulation but no pixel software emulation for features not available in hardware.

There are many features and issues that proponents of either API disagree over, see Comparison of OpenGL and Direct3D for a summary.

Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide.

Direct3D 5. 0 introduced the DrawPrimitive API that eliminated the need for applications to construct execute buffers.

Direct3D 6. 0 introduced numerous features to cover contemporary hardware ( such as multitexture and stencil buffers ) as well as optimized geometry pipelines for x87, SSE and 3DNow!

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.

Direct3D 7. 0 introduced the. dds texture format and support for transform and lighting hardware acceleration ( first available on PC hardware with NVIDIA's GeForce ), as well as the ability to allocate vertex buffers in hardware memory.

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.

Direct3D subsumed all remaining DirectDraw API calls still needed for application development, such as Present (), the function used to display rendering results.

Direct3D 9. 0 added a new version of the High Level Shader Language, support for floating-point texture formats, Multiple Render Targets, and texture lookups in the vertex shader.

An extension only available in Windows Vista, called Direct3D 9Ex ( previously versioned 9. 0L ), allows the use of the advantages offered by Windows Vista's Windows Display Driver Model ( WDDM ) and is used for Windows Aero.

As of DirectX 8, this component has been deprecated in favor of Direct3D, which provides more general high-performance graphics functionality ( as 2D rendering is a subset of 3D rendering ).

A programmer could use DirectDraw to draw 3D graphics, but the rendering would be slow compared to an API such as Direct3D which does support 3D hardware acceleration.

Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including z-buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, alpha blending, mipmapping, atmospheric effects, and perspective-correct texture mapping.

Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D overlay planes, and even sprites, providing the use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media titles.

Direct3D is a 3D API.

Microsoft strives to continually update Direct3D to support the latest technology available on 3D graphics cards.

For example, if software programmed using Direct3D requires pixel shaders and the video card on the user's computer does not support that feature, Direct3D will not emulate it, although it will compute and render the polygons and textures of the 3D models, albeit at a usually degraded quality and performance compared to the hardware equivalent.

A new real-time software rasterizer, WARP, designed to emulate complete feature set of Direct3D 10. 1, is included with Windows 7 ; its performance is said to be on par with lower-end 3D cards on multi-core CPUs.

Direct3D initially implemented " retained mode " and " immediate mode " 3D APIs.

Direct3D 8 contained many powerful 3D graphics features, such as vertex shaders, pixel shaders, fog, bump mapping and texture mapping.

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.

It offered a notably large leap in 3D gaming performance and was the first fully Direct3D 7-compliant 3D accelerator.

It uses a more powerful game engine that supports 3D acceleration using Direct3D 5. 0.

It is one of the early games to adopt the use of 3D graphics hardware acceleration using Microsoft Direct3D.

Most often, 3D engines or the rendering systems in game engines are built upon a graphics application programming interface ( API ) such as Direct3D or OpenGL which provides a software abstraction of the graphics processing unit ( GPU ) or video card.

The Radeon VE had the advantage of somewhat better dual-monitor display software, but it did not offer hardware T & L, an emerging 3D rendering feature of the day that was the major attraction of Direct3D 7.

It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default ( but could be re-enabled in the Unreal. ini file ) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver and present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.

The first version of Direct3D immediate mode was based on an " execute buffer " programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly.

Direct3D 8. 0 introduced programmability in the form of vertex and pixel shaders, enabling developers to write code without worrying about superfluous hardware state.

Instead, it defines a minimum standard of hardware capabilities which must be supported for a display system to be " Direct3D 10 compatible ".

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.

Direct3D 10. 1 level hardware must support the following features:

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 will be supported exclusively by new hardware.