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 ).

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.

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

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

Direct3D is used to render three dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games.

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.

Direct3D is a 3D API.

That is, it contains many commands for 3D rendering ; however, since version 8, Direct3D has superseded the old DirectDraw framework and also taken responsibility for the rendering of 2D graphics.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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 8. 0 also eliminated DirectDraw as a separate API.

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.

Direct3D 11. 1 also features 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.

DXUT ( also called the sample framework ) is a layer built on top of the Direct3D API.

Support of the full Direct3D 7 API also assured the card of a strong future, unlike its initial Direct3D 6 based competition.

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.

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 engine used Direct3D to take advantage of hardware acceleration, but also had a software 3D engine for those computers without 3D cards.

GoldSrc, the engine derived from the Quake engine by Valve Corporation for Half-Life ( 1998 ), added Direct3D support, and a skeletal framework to better render the NPCs, and also greatly improved the NPCs artificial intelligence ( AI ) compared to the Quake engine.

Optionally, an application using a Direct3D 10 interface and Direct3D 10 hardware may also specify a geometry shader.

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

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 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.

Direct3D and OpenGL are competing application programming interfaces ( APIs ) which can be used in applications to render 2D and 3D computer graphics, taking advantage of hardware acceleration when available.

Similar to how texture compression had been part of the Direct3D specification for years and was used for compressing regular textures, normal map compression compacted this new type of surface detail layer.

Although no games released after 1999 depend on Glide for 3D acceleration ( Direct3D and OpenGL are used instead ), Glide emulation is still needed to run older games in hardware accelerated mode.

Arena Wars was the first commercial game to utilize the. NET Framework, however it used a managed OpenGL wrapper rather than the XNA Framework / Direct3D API.

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.

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.

Direct3D 10. 1 was announced by Microsoft shortly after the release of Direct3D 10 as a minor update.

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 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.

By 2000, the improved performance of Direct3D and OpenGL on the average personal computer, coupled with the huge variety of new 3D cards on the market, the widespread support of these standard APIs by the game developer community and the closure of 3dfx, would make Glide obsolete.

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.

It originated in the era of software rendering on PCs prior to the appearance of GPUs, competing with other libraries such as Argonaut's BRender and RenderMorphics ' Reality Lab ( the latter was acquired by Microsoft and became Direct3D ).

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.

Geometry shaders were recently introduced with Direct3D 10 and OpenGL 3. 2, but are currently supported only by high-end video cards.

However, Cg is a third-party shading language developed by Nvidia that outputs both OpenGL and Direct3D shaders.