If you have a computer and you play games you have heard this term before “Direct X” but maybe you are not sure of what does it mean or what is it useful for. Direct X is a long running technology developed by Microsoft and its main use is to make games easier to program as well as graphic apps, but it has other uses.
Basically Direct X is a pack of different application programming interfaces or commonly denominated APIs which were intended to handle multimedia tasks such as games or video applications, all of them running under Microsoft Platforms, this is different versions of Windows. The name was given because before it existed there were such APIs in separate packages but they all started with the word Direct. The most known were DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectMusic, DirectDraw and Direct3D.
The DirectX name was given because people started to use that term to refer to the full collection of APIs being named with the Direct word before, but the X was used later by Microsoft to give the name to their gaming console. The name Xbox comes from the X of DirectX and means that the console has been developed with the DirectX technology.
At the beginning of the run, DirectX was not installed in windows by default and the user had to install the libraries when an application needed them, but in the last version of Windows 95 it was installed and since then all Windows versions have DirectX installed by default.
Since it started running, there have been a lot of versions of DirecX starting from DirectX 1.0 and at the moment running the DirectX 11 version and they had a different collection of APIs but the main ones are featured below:
- DirectDraw: Used to draw 2D objects but it is not used now because Direct2D is much better for the most of apps, but still some apps use it.
- Direct3D or more commonly D3D is used to draw 3D graphics.
- Direct2D is used now to draw 2D graphics.
- DirectWrite is an app used mainly for fonts.
- DXGI it is used to manage swap chains in versions of Direct3D 10 or up.
- DirectCompute is used for GPU computing.
- DirectPlay was used as a communication API but it is not used after DX 8.0
- DirectX Media Objects: It is used to aid streaming objects.
- DirectX Media comprises different APIs itself and it is used mainly for 2D / 3D animation and audio.
- DirectMusic used to playback soundtracks.
- DirectSound used to play or record waveform sounds
- DirectSetup is used to detect the current version of DirectX and to install new components if necessary.
There are other minor APIs used now or used in the past and now replaced by new ones, but basically the function of them all is the same, to improve the graphics and sound effects of games and other graphic or sound based apps.
