19 Facts About DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms.

The name DirectX was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs and soon became the name of the collection.

The X initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool, while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite.

DirectX allowed all versions of Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows 95, to incorporate high-performance multimedia.

Alex St John, the evangelist for DirectX, 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 team faced the challenging task of testing each DirectX release against an array of computer hardware and software.

The DirectX team built and distributed tests that allowed the hardware industry to confirm that new hardware designs and driver releases would be compatible with DirectX.

DirectX has been confirmed to be present in Microsoft's Windows Phone 8.

Controversially, the original name for the DirectX project was the "Manhattan Project", a reference to the US nuclear weapons initiative.

DirectX functionality is provided in the form of COM-style objects and interfaces.

DirectX 9 was released in 2002 for Windows 98, Me, and XP, and currently is supported by all subsequent versions.

Many former parts of DirectX API were deprecated in the latest DirectX 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.

DirectX 12 was announced by Microsoft at GDC on March 20, 2014, and was officially launched alongside Windows 10 on July 29, 2015.

Primary feature highlight for the new release of DirectX was the introduction of advanced low-level programming APIs for Direct3D 12 which can reduce driver overhead.

Multiadapter support will feature in DirectX 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.

DirectX 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.

In March 2018, DirectX 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.

Various releases of Windows have included and supported various versions of DirectX, allowing newer versions of the operating system to continue running applications designed for earlier versions of DirectX until those versions can be gradually phased out in favor of newer APIs, drivers, and hardware.

Early versions of DirectX included an up-to-date library of all of the DirectX compatible drivers currently available.