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.

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That is, it contains many commands for 3D rendering ; however, since version 8, Direct3D has superseded the old DirectDraw framework and also taken responsibility for the rendering of 2D graphics.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

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

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.

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.

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.

* Multithreaded rendering — to render to the same Direct3D device object from different threads for multi core CPUs

It was built to render within the Direct3D 5 and OpenGL API specifications.

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.

The render thread picks up a copy of the visual tree and walks the tree calculating which components will be visible and renders them to Direct3D surfaces.

Direct3D immediate mode presents three main abstractions: devices, resources and swap chains ( see attached diagram ).

Introduced three months after NVIDIA acquired 3dfx and marketed as the nFinite FX Engine, the GeForce 3 was the first Microsoft Direct3D 8. 0 compliant 3D-card.

However, the Direct3D renderer, released initially to support the new Matrox G200, was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics quality issues.

* Direct3D for access to 3D hardware accelerated graphics.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Direct3D 10. 1 sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, and gives developers more control over image quality.

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

The aim of Direct3D is to abstract the communication between a graphics application and the graphics hardware drivers.