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.

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.

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.

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.

Some features present in previous versions of D3DX were removed in Direct3D 11, such as:

In computing, D3DX ( Direct3D Extension ) is a high level API library which is written to supplement Microsoft's Direct3D graphics API.

The D3DX library was introduced in Direct3D 7, and subsequently was improved in Direct3D 9.

Since the Direct3D API is relatively low-level, using the D3DX library is usually much simpler.

Microsoft was at the same time trying to introduce their own similar library, Direct3D ( D3D ), and even though QD3D beat it to market and was technically superior, it was soon clear to everyone that it was destined to be ignored in favor of Direct3D.

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.

; Around 1999: Sinbad realises that his ' DIMClass ' project, a project to make an easy to use object-oriented Direct3D library, has become so abstracted that it really doesn't need to be based on Direct3D any more.

Nvidia's " NV1 " chip had been designed for a fundamentally different type of rendering technology, called quadratic texture mapping, a technique not supported by Direct3D.

The RIVA 128 was instead designed to accelerate Direct3D to the utmost extent possible.

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

A common criticism of the D3DXSprite was that it was slow but this issue has been addressed as of Direct3D 9.

Jabo's Direct3D video plug-ins utilize a just-in-time exception handler that attempts to rectify the problem by reviewing many stored fixes common to the exception, and often resetting data that has been corrupted.

Its main competitor ( Direct3D from Microsoft ) runs only on Microsoft Windows-based machines including the Dreamcast and Xbox consoles.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A team in Redmond took over development of the Direct3D Immediate mode, while Servan's RenderMorphics team continued work on the Retained mode.

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.

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.

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 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.

The Microsoft Direct3D 11 API defines a process to convert a group of vertices, textures, buffers, and state into an image on the screen.