Microsoft DirectX 9 is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms.
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The name DirectX 9 was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs and soon became the name of the collection.
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DirectX 9 allowed all versions of Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows 95, to incorporate high-performance multimedia.
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Alex St John, the evangelist for DirectX 9, staged an elaborate event at the 1996 Computer Game Developers Conference which game developer Jay Barnson described as a Roman theme, including real lions, togas, and something resembling an indoor carnival.
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DirectX 9 team faced the challenging task of testing each DirectX 9 release against an array of computer hardware and software.
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The DirectX 9 team built and distributed tests that allowed the hardware industry to confirm that new hardware designs and driver releases would be compatible with DirectX 9.
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DirectX 9 has been confirmed to be present in Microsoft's Windows Phone 8.
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Controversially, the original name for the DirectX 9 project was the "Manhattan Project", a reference to the US nuclear weapons initiative.
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DirectX 9 functionality is provided in the form of COM-style objects and interfaces.
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DirectX 9 was released in 2002 for Windows 98, Me, and XP, and currently is supported by all subsequent versions.
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Many former parts of DirectX 9 API were deprecated in the latest DirectX 9 SDK and are preserved for compatibility only: DirectInput was deprecated in favor of XInput, DirectSound was deprecated in favor of the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool system and additionally lost support for hardware accelerated audio, since the Vista audio stack renders sound in software on the CPU.
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Primary feature highlight for the new release of DirectX 9 was the introduction of advanced low-level programming APIs for Direct3D 12 which can reduce driver overhead.
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Multiadapter support will feature in DirectX 9 12 allowing developers to utilize multiple GPUs on a system simultaneously; multi-GPU support was previously dependent on vendor implementations such as AMD CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI.
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DirectX 9 12 is supported on all Fermi and later Nvidia GPUs, on AMD's GCN-based chips and on Intel's Haswell and later processors' graphics units.
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In March 2018, DirectX 9 Raytracing was announced, capable of real-time ray-tracing on supported hardware, and the DXR API was added in the Windows 10 October 2018 update.
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Various releases of Windows have included and supported various versions of DirectX 9, allowing newer versions of the operating system to continue running applications designed for earlier versions of DirectX 9 until those versions can be gradually phased out in favor of newer APIs, drivers, and hardware.
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Early versions of DirectX 9 included an up-to-date library of all of the DirectX 9 compatible drivers currently available.
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