DirectX Capabilities and Features

DirectX is a family of "application program interfaces" (APIs) first released in 1995 to enhance the gaming developers write to a standard interface without having to know what hardware was installed on the computer. This interface provides access to video cards, joysticks, sound card, network interface cards, and other devices and, over the years, has become popular with software developers.

There have been DirectX versions 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8.x, 9 and now DirectX 10. The DirectX 2.0 release, the first major release, became available as a part of the Windows 95 OSR2 (OEM Service Release 2). When Windows 98 launched, DirectX had evolved to release 5.2. Microsoft Windows XP originally shipped with DirectX 8.1 by default. After the release of Windows XP, DirectX was upgraded to DirectX 9 and with the introduction of the new Microsoft Vista operating system DirectX 10 became available. DirectX had a minor upgrade to version 10.1 with the release of Windows 7. Note: You can also download the latest version of DirectX from the Microsoft Download Center

The release of DirectX 10 came several new API enhancements: Direct3D, DirectDraw, and DirectSound.

Direct3D is designed to create 3-D object and 3-D animations and creates a powerful link between your computer's video adapter and gaming applications. On high-end gaming computers, Direct3D enables faster processing of animations and more realistic 3-D objects with enhanced shading and motion to be displayed on your monitor. With Direct3D, software programmers can use hardware acceleration to render three-dimensional graphics on graphic cards without burdening the main computer processor. It provides an application interface for the computational intensive algorithms of z-buffering, anti-aliasing, alpha blending, mipmapping, atmospheric effects, and texture mapping that are often used in gaming and engineering applications.

DirectDraw upgraded the 2-D (two dimensional) visual effects. Many general and business applications such as spreadsheets, word processors, email applications and many Windows user interface features use 2-D effects. DirectDraw increased the visual image processing capability of these applications and improved the communication interface between the main computer processor and the video card that displays the images on your monitor. Like Direct3D, DirectDraw allows the computation intensive graphic processing to be offloaded to the video graphics card and allows direct access to the video memory and memory hardware overlays that speed up the graphics processing. With the release of Windows 7, DirectDraw as an API was deprecated since this functionality has been incorporated into the Direct3D interface.

DirectSound establishes the communication link between multimedia software, like Windows Media Player, and the computer's soundcard. It enhances the audio performance and effects. It also improved the computer's efficiency when incorporating subtle audio effects used during playback and mixing that produces the reverb, echo, flange, and audio spatialization effects. One of the best features provided by DirectSound is the ability to allow several applications to share access to the sound card simultaneously to provide multi-channel high-resolution sound.

DirectMusic was a high-level set of multimedia programming interfaces that was built on top of the DirectSound low-level interface. The DirectMusic interface has been depreciated and the functionality has since been incorporated in the DirectSound interface. DirectMusic was first released in 1996 to provide synthesized sounds, such as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and wavetable synthesis.

DirectPlay is a network communication library intended for online computer games. DirectPlay is an application interface that connects to the computers modem or NIC (network interface card). DirectPlay provides a set of tools that allow players to find game session and Internet sites that manage the communication between online gaming host and the players in either a client-server or peer-to-peer mode. It provides a way for applications to communicate with each other, regardless of the underlying online service or protocol.

Although DirectX is an integral part of the Windows operating system, sometimes it can get corrupted and cause problems. DirectX is notorious for having versioning problems where each new version is not fully compatible with the previous version. Since DirectX is an integral part of the Windows operating system, an uninstall option was never provided. To uninstall DirectX and reinstall the latest version, see Uninstall DirectX .