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.

Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth.

On December 17, 1997, Microsoft and SGI initiated the Fahrenheit project, which was a joint effort with the goal of unifying the OpenGL and Direct3D interfaces ( and adding a scene-graph API too ).

Further examples include some of the early versions of the pixel shader languages embedded in Direct3D and OpenGL extensions, or a series of mathematical formulae in a spreadsheet with no cycles.

An out-of-the-box copy of GPL lacks several features that one might expect from a modern driving simulation, and so most people add as a matter of course several patches: the official version 1. 2 patch that adds force feedback ; a second patch to add Direct3D and / or OpenGL support ; and a third patch that gets around a problem that prevents the original game from working on computers with CPUs faster than 1. 4 GHz.

As of DirectX version 8. 0, DirectDraw was merged into a new package called DirectX Graphics, which is really just Direct3D with a few DirectDraw API additions.

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.

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.

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 proprietary APIs such as 3dfx's Glide.

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.

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 in development, such as Hellgate: London or Crysis.

In 2011, Intel chipsets started supporting Direct3D 10. 1 with the introduction of HD graphics 2000 ( GMA HD ).

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 ).

Direct3D 11. 1 is an update to the API that will initially ship with Windows 8.

Direct3D communicates with GDI to generate the graphical output in the display.

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.

This strategy differed from that of other 3D APIs of the era ( Direct3D, OpenGL, and QuickDraw 3D ), which hid low-level hardware details behind an " abstraction layer ", with the goal of providing application developers a standard, hardware-neutral interface.

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.

As Direct3D is the most widely publicized component of DirectX, it is common to see the names " DirectX " and " Direct3D " used interchangeably.

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 ).

Direct3D is part of Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface ( API ).

This resulted in the first version of Direct3D that shipped in DirectX 2. 0 and DirectX 3. 0.

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 after DirectX 3. 0.

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 was not considered to be user friendly, but as of DirectX version 8. 1, many usability problems were resolved.

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 ..

The Direct3D 11 Technical Preview has been included in November 2008 release of DirectX SDK.

Direct3D is a Microsoft DirectX API subsystem component.

* DirectX – Collection of API's in which Direct3D is implemented

MPlayer also supports a variety of different output drivers for displaying video, including VDPAU, the X video extension, OpenGL, DirectX, Direct3D, Quartz Compositor, VESA, Framebuffer, SDL and rarer ones such as ASCII art and Blinkenlights.

Unlike Windows 95 ( which did not include DirectX until the OSR2 release in August 1996 ), Windows NT 4. 0 does not support Direct3D and USB.

It runs well on what ( by Intel Atom standards ) are relatively underpowered OpenGL 1. 3 ( with GLSL support ), OpenGL ES 2. 0 or Direct3D ( DirectX ) 9. 0 capable systems that are IA-32 / x86, x86-64, ARM, or PowerPC G4 or later CPU based.

Microsoft's Direct3D 9. 0 now chooses at runtime processor-specific implementations of its own math operations, including the use of SIMD-capable instructions.

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.

Direct3D 9. 0Ex was previously known as version 1. 0 of Windows Graphics Foundation ( WGF ).

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.

The Direct3D 11 runtime is able to run on Direct3D 9 and 10. x-class hardware and drivers, expanding the functionality first introduced in Direct3D 10. 1 runtime.

Feature levels 9_1, 9_2 and 9_3 encapsulate various features of popular Direct3D 9 cards, and feature levels 10_0 and 10_1 refer to Direct3D 10 and 10. 1 respectively ; each upper level is a strict superset of a lower level.

The Wine project has working implementations of the Direct3D 8, 9 and 10 APIs ( they are, as of 23 July 2012, 100 %, 78 % and 79 % complete respectively ).

By October 2002, with the introduction of the ATI Radeon 9700 ( also known as R300 ), the world's first Direct3D 9. 0 accelerator, pixel and vertex shaders could implement looping and lengthy floating point math, and in general were quickly becoming as flexible as CPUs, and orders of magnitude faster for image-array operations.

The design of the standard class libraries ( VCL / RTL ) had become somewhat dated and restrictive ; Embarcadero released in 2011 as part of Delphi XE2 a new compiler and cross-platform VCL replacement called FireMonkey, based on Direct3D and OpenGL, which runs on other platforms in addition to Windows, supporting their features, but is not backwards-compatible with VCL applications.

SwiftShader is an advanced software renderer with Direct3D 8 / 9 class features, including shaders.

The class library abstracts the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other high level classes.