Direct3D
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Direct3D is a graphics
application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...
(API) for
Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
. Part of
DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses
hardware acceleration Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calcula ...
if it is available on the
graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...
, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including
Z-buffering A depth buffer, also known as a z-buffer, is a type of data buffer used in computer graphics to represent depth information of objects in 3D space from a particular perspective. Depth buffers are an aid to rendering a scene to ensure that the ...
, W-buffering,
stencil buffer A stencil buffer is an extra data buffer, in addition to the ''color buffer'' and ''Z-buffer'', found on modern graphics hardware. The buffer is per pixel and works on integer values, usually with a depth of one byte per pixel. The Z-buffer and ...
ing,
spatial anti-aliasing In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts ( aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphi ...
,
alpha blending In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pas ...
, color blending,
mipmap In computer graphics, mipmaps (also MIP maps) or pyramids are pre-calculated, optimized sequences of images, each of which is a progressively lower resolution representation of the previous. The height and width of each image, or level, in the ...
ping, texture blending,
clipping Clipping may refer to: Words * Clipping (morphology), the formation of a new word by shortening it, e.g. "ad" from "advertisement" * Clipping (phonetics), shortening the articulation of a speech sound, usually a vowel * Clipping (publications) ...
,
culling In biology, culling is the process of segregating organisms from a group according to desired or undesired characteristics. In animal breeding, it is the process of removing or segregating animals from a breeding stock based on a specific tr ...
, atmospheric effects, perspective-correct
texture mapping Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color. History The original technique was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974. Texture mapping ...
, programmable
HLSL The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
shaders In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of speci ...
and effects. Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D
overlay Overlay may refer to: Computers *Overlay network, a computer network which is built on top of another network *Hardware overlay, one type of video overlay that uses memory dedicated to the application *Another term for exec, replacing one process ...
planes, and even sprites, providing the use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media ties. Direct3D contains many commands for
3D computer graphics 3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for th ...
rendering; however, since version 8, Direct3D has superseded the
DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as m ...
framework and also taken responsibility for the rendering of 2D graphics. Microsoft strives to continually update Direct3D to support the latest technology available on 3D graphics cards. Direct3D offers full vertex software
emulation Emulation may refer to: *Emulation (computing), imitation of behavior of a computer or other electronic system with the help of another type of system :*Video game console emulator, software which emulates video game consoles *Gaussian process em ...
but no pixel software emulation for features not available in hardware. For example, if software programmed using Direct3D requires
pixel shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the Rendering (computer graphics), rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved ...
s and the
video card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...
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. The API does include a ''
Reference Rasterizer Software rendering is the process of generating an image from a model by means of computer software. In the context of computer graphics rendering, software rendering refers to a rendering process that is not dependent upon graphics hardware AS ...
'' (or REF device), which emulates a generic graphics card in software, although it is too slow for most real-time 3D applications and is typically only used for debugging. A new real-time software rasterizer, ''
WARP Warp, warped or warping may refer to: Arts and entertainment Books and comics * WaRP Graphics, an alternative comics publisher * ''Warp'' (First Comics), comic book series published by First Comics based on the play ''Warp!'' * Warp (comics), a ...
'', designed to emulate the complete feature set of Direct3D 10.1, is included with
Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 with the Platform Update; its performance is said to be on par with lower-end 3D cards on multi-core CPUs. As part of
DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
, Direct3D is available for
Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...
and above, and is the base for the
vector graphics Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display a ...
API on the different versions of
Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by the na ...
console systems. The
Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...
compatibility layer, a
free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
reimplementation of several Windows APIs, includes an implementation of Direct3D. Direct3D's main competitor is Khronos'
OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
and its follow-on
Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...
.
Fahrenheit The Fahrenheit scale () is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736). It uses the degree Fahrenheit (symbol: °F) as the unit. Several accounts of how he originally defined his ...
was an attempt by Microsoft and
SGI SGI may refer to: Companies *Saskatchewan Government Insurance *Scientific Games International, a gambling company *Silicon Graphics, Inc., a former manufacturer of high-performance computing products *Silicon Graphics International, formerly Rac ...
to unify OpenGL and Direct3D in the 1990s, but was eventually cancelled.


Overview

* Direct3D 6.0 –
Multitexturing Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color. History The original technique was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974. Texture mapping ...
* Direct3D 7.0 – Hardware Transformation, Clipping and Lighting (TCL/T&L) * Direct3D 8.0 – Pixel
Shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of spec ...
1.0 & Vertex Shader 1.0 * Direct3D 8.0a - last version supported for
Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...
; Pixel Shader 1.1, Pixel Shader 1.2, Pixel Shader 1.3 * Direct3D 8.1 – Pixel Shader 1.4 & Vertex Shader 1.1 * Direct3D 9.0 – Shader Model 2.0 (Pixel Shader 2.0 & Vertex Shader 2.0) * Direct3D 9.0b – Pixel Shader 2.0b * Direct3D 9.0c – last version supported for
Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...
(early releases) and for
Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), releas ...
/ XP (all releases); Shader Model 3.0 (Pixel Shader 3.0 & Vertex Shader 3.0),
GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...
* Direct3D 9.0L –
Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
only; Direct3D 9.0c, Shader Model 3.0, Windows Graphics Foundation 1.0,
DXVA DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API specification for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms that allows video decoding to be hardware-accelerated. The pipeline allows certain CPU-intensive operations such as iDCT, motio ...
1.0, GPGPU * Direct3D 10.0 – Windows Vista/Windows 7;
Shader Model 4.0 The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
, Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0, DXVA 2.0, GPGPU * Direct3D 10.1 – Windows Vista SP1/Windows 7; Shader Model 4.1, Windows Graphics Foundation 2.1, DXVA 2.1, GPGPU * Direct3D 11.0 – Windows Vista SP2/
Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
; Shader Model 5.0, Tessellation, Multithreaded rendering,
Compute shader In computing, a compute kernel is a routine compiled for high throughput accelerators (such as graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)), separate from but used by a main prog ...
s, implemented by hardware and software running Direct3D 9/10/10.1, GPGPU * Direct3D 11.1 –
Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
(partially supported on Windows 7 SP1 also); Stereoscopic 3D Rendering, GPGPU * Direct3D 11.2 – Windows 8.1; Tiled resources, GPGPU * Direct3D 11.3 –
Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
; Shader Model 5.1, GPGPU * Direct3D 12.0 –
Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
; low-level rendering
API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
, Shader Model 6.0, GPGPU


Direct3D 2.0 and 3.0

In 1992, Servan Keondjian and Doug Rabson started a company named RenderMorphics, which developed a 3D graphics API named
Reality Lab Reality Lab was a 3D computer graphics API created by RenderMorphics to provide a standardized interface for writing games. It was one of the main contenders in the realtime 3D middleware marketplace at the time, alongside Criterion Software's Rend ...
, which was used in medical imaging and CAD software. Two versions of this API were released. Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in February 1995, bringing Keondjian on board to implement a 3D graphics engine for
Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...
. The first version of Direct3D shipped in DirectX 2.0 (June 2, 1996) and DirectX 3.0 (September 26, 1996). Direct3D initially implemented an " immediate mode" 3D API and layered upon it a "
retained mode Retained mode in computer graphics is a major pattern of API design in graphics libraries, in which * the graphics library, instead of the client, retains the scene (complete object model of the rendering primitives) to be rendered and * the ...
" 3D API. Both types of API were already offered with the second release of Reality Lab before Direct3D was released. Like other DirectX APIs, such as
DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as m ...
, both were based on
COM Com or COM may refer to: Computing * COM (hardware interface), a serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers * COM file, or .com file, short for "command", a file extension for an executable file in MS-DOS * .com, an Internet top-level d ...
. The retained mode API was a
scene graph Scene (from Greek σκηνή ''skēnḗ'') may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Scene (subculture), a youth subculture from the early 2000s characterized by a distinct music and style. Groups and performers * The Scene who rec ...
API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold a significant volume, ''
Lego Island ''Lego Island'' is a Lego-themed action-adventure game developed and published by Mindscape. It was released for Microsoft Windows on September 26, 1997, as the second Lego video game overall and the first one outside Japan. In the "proto- ...
'' and '' Lego Rock Raiders'', were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode API after DirectX 3.0. For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by the hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were considered extremely awkward to program at the time, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D) Rather than adopt OpenGL as a gaming API, Microsoft chose to continue improving Direct3D, not only to be competitive with OpenGL, but to compete more effectively with other proprietary APIs such as 3dfx's
Glide Glide may refer to: * Gliding flight, to fly without thrust Computing *Glide API, a 3D graphics interface *Glide OS, a web desktop *Glide (software), an instant video messenger *Glide, a molecular docking software by Schrödinger (company), Schr ...
. From the beginning, the immediate mode also supported
Talisman A talisman is any object ascribed with religious or magical powers intended to protect, heal, or harm individuals for whom they are made. Talismans are often portable objects carried on someone in a variety of ways, but can also be installed perm ...
's
tiled rendering Tiled rendering is the process of subdividing a computer graphics image by a regular grid in optical space and rendering each section of the grid, or ''tile'', separately. The advantage to this design is that the amount of memory and bandwidth is re ...
with the BeginScene/EndScene methods of the IDirect3DDevice interface.


Direct3D 4.0

No substantive changes were planned to Direct3D for DirectX 4.0, which was scheduled to ship in late 1996 and then cancelled.


Direct3D 5.0

In December 1996, a team in Redmond took over development of the Direct3D Immediate Mode, while the London-based RenderMorphics team continued work on the Retained Mode. The Redmond team added the DrawPrimitive API that eliminated the need for applications to construct execute buffers, making Direct3D more closely resemble other immediate mode rendering APIs such as
Glide Glide may refer to: * Gliding flight, to fly without thrust Computing *Glide API, a 3D graphics interface *Glide OS, a web desktop *Glide (software), an instant video messenger *Glide, a molecular docking software by Schrödinger (company), Schr ...
and
OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
. The first beta of DrawPrimitive shipped in February 1997, and the final version shipped with DirectX 5.0 in August 1997. Besides introducing an easier-to-use immediate mode API, DirectX 5.0 added the SetRenderTarget method that enabled Direct3D devices to write their graphical output to a variety of DirectDraw surfaces.


Direct3D 6.0

DirectX 6.0 (released in August, 1998) introduced numerous features to cover contemporary hardware (such as multitexture and
stencil buffer A stencil buffer is an extra data buffer, in addition to the ''color buffer'' and ''Z-buffer'', found on modern graphics hardware. The buffer is per pixel and works on integer values, usually with a depth of one byte per pixel. The Z-buffer and ...
s) as well as optimized
geometry pipeline Geometric manipulation of modelling primitives, such as that performed by a geometry pipeline, is the first stage in computer graphics systems which perform image generation based on geometric models. While geometry pipelines were originally implem ...
s for x87, SSE and 3DNow! and optional texture management to simplify programming. Direct3D 6.0 also included support for features that had been licensed by Microsoft from specific hardware vendors for inclusion in the API, in exchange for the time-to-market advantage to the licensing vendor.
S3 texture compression S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) (sometimes also called DXTn, DXTC, or BCn) is a group of related lossy texture compression algorithms originally developed by Iourcha et al. of S3 Graphics, Ltd. for use in their Savage 3D computer graphics accelerat ...
support was one such feature, renamed as DXTC for purposes of inclusion in the API. Another was TriTech's proprietary
bump mapping Bump mapping is a texture mapping technique in computer graphics for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is achieved by perturbing the surface normals of the object and using the perturbed normal during lighting cal ...
technique. Microsoft included these features in DirectX, then added them to the requirements needed for drivers to get a Windows logo to encourage broad adoption of the features in other vendors' hardware. A minor update to DirectX 6.0 came in the February, 1999 DirectX 6.1 update. Besides adding
DirectMusic DirectMusic is a deprecated component of the Microsoft DirectX API that allows music and sound effects to be composed and played and provides flexible interactive control over the way they are played. Architecturally, DirectMusic is a high-level se ...
support for the first time, this release improved support for
Intel Pentium III The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial p ...
3D extensions. A confidential memo sent in 1997 shows Microsoft planning to announce full support for
Talisman A talisman is any object ascribed with religious or magical powers intended to protect, heal, or harm individuals for whom they are made. Talismans are often portable objects carried on someone in a variety of ways, but can also be installed perm ...
in DirectX 6.0, but the API ended up being cancelled (See the
Microsoft Talisman Talisman was a Microsoft project to build a new 3D graphics architecture based on quickly compositing 2D "sub-images" onto the screen, an adaptation of tiled rendering. In theory, this approach would dramatically reduce the amount of memory bandwid ...
page for details).


Direct3D 7.0

DirectX 7.0 (released in September, 1999) introduced the .dds texture format and support for
transform and lighting Transform, clipping, and lighting (T&L or TCL) is a term used in computer graphics. Overview Transformation is the task of producing a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional scene. Clipping means only drawing the parts of the scene that w ...
hardware acceleration Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calcula ...
(first available on PC hardware with Nvidia's
GeForce 256 The GeForce 256 is the original release in Nvidia's " GeForce" product-line. Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor ( RIVA TNT2) by increasing the number of fixed pixel pipeli ...
), as well as the ability to allocate vertex buffers in hardware memory. Hardware vertex buffers represent the first substantive improvement over OpenGL in DirectX history. 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 8.0

DirectX 8.0, released in November, 2000, introduced programmability in the form of vertex and pixel
shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of spec ...
s, enabling developers to write code without worrying about superfluous hardware state. The complexity of the shader programs depended on the complexity of the task, and the
display driver In electronics/computer hardware, a display driver is usually a semiconductor integrated circuit (but may alternatively comprise a state machine made of discrete logic and other components) which provides an interface function between a micropr ...
compiled In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...
those shaders to instructions that could be understood by the hardware. 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. Direct3D 8.0 also eliminated
DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as m ...
as a separate API. Direct3D subsumed all remaining DirectDraw API calls still needed for application development, such as Present(), the function used to display rendering results. Direct3D was not considered to be user friendly, but as of DirectX version 8.1, many usability problems were resolved. Direct3D 8 contained many powerful 3D graphics features, such as
vertex shaders In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of speci ...
,
pixel shaders In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of speci ...
,
fog Fog is a visible aerosol consisting of tiny water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the air at or near the Earth's surface. Reprint from Fog can be considered a type of low-lying cloud usually resembling stratus, and is heavily influ ...
,
bump mapping Bump mapping is a texture mapping technique in computer graphics for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is achieved by perturbing the surface normals of the object and using the perturbed normal during lighting cal ...
and
texture mapping Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color. History The original technique was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974. Texture mapping ...
.


Direct3D 9

Direct3D 9.0, released in December 2002, added a new version of the
High Level Shader Language The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
support for floating-point texture formats,
Multiple Render Targets In the field of 3D computer graphics, Multiple Render Targets, or MRT, is a feature of modern graphics processing units (GPUs) that allows the programmable rendering pipeline to render images to multiple render target textures at once. These textu ...
(MRT), Multiple-Element Textures, texture lookups in the vertex shader and stencil buffer techniques. Direct3D 9Ex''
Direct3D 9Ex improvements - Win32 apps
An extension only available in Windows Vista and newer (7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11), called Direct3D 9Ex (previously versioned 9.0L (L - codename Windows Longhorn)), allows the use of the advantages offered by Windows Vista's
Windows Display Driver Model Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) is the graphic driver architecture for video card drivers running Microsoft Windows versions beginning with Windows Vista. It is a replacement for the previous Windows 2000 and Windows XP display driver model ...
(WDDM) and is used for
Windows Aero Windows Aero (a backronym for ''Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open'') is a design language introduced in the Windows Vista operating system. The changes made in the Aero interface affected many elements of the Windows interface, includin ...
. 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. Direct3D 9Ex was previously known as version 1.0 of Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF).


Direct3D 10

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
includes a major update to the Direct3D API. Originally called WGF 2.0 (Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0), then DirectX 10 and DirectX Next. Direct3D 10 features an updated
shader model The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
4.0 and optional interruptibility for shader programs. In this model shaders still consist of fixed stages as in previous versions, but all stages support a nearly unified interface, as well as a unified access paradigm for resources such as textures and shader constants. The language itself has been extended to be more expressive, including integer operations, a greatly increased instruction count, and more C-like language constructs. In addition to the previously available
vertex Vertex, vertices or vertexes may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics and computer science *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines, or edges meet * Vertex (computer graphics), a data structure that describes the positio ...
and
pixel shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the Rendering (computer graphics), rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved ...
stages, the API includes a
geometry shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of speci ...
stage that breaks the old model of one vertex in/one vertex out, to allow geometry to be generated from within a shader, thus allowing for complex geometry to be generated entirely by the graphics hardware. Windows XP is not supported by DirectX 10.0 and above. Furthermore, Direct3D 10 dropped support for the retained mode API which had been a part of Direct3D since the beginning making Windows Vista incompatible with 3D games that had used the retained mode API as their
rendering engine Rendering or image synthesis is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model by means of a computer program. The resulting image is referred to as the render. Multiple models can be defined ...
. 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. Instead, it defines a minimum standard of hardware capabilities which must be supported for a display system to be "Direct3D 10 compatible". This is a significant departure, with the goal of streamlining application code by removing capability-checking code and special cases based on the presence or absence of specific capabilities. Because Direct3D 10 hardware was comparatively rare after the initial release of
Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
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. Examples of such titles are games originally written for Direct3D 9 and ported to Direct3D 10 after their release, such as ''
Company of Heroes ''Company of Heroes'' is a real-time strategy video game series developed by Relic Entertainment. The series is set during World War II. Games ''Company of Heroes'' The first game in the series was released on September 12, 2006 in North ...
'', or games originally developed for Direct3D 9 with a Direct3D 10 path retrofitted later during their development, such as '' Hellgate: London'' or ''
Crysis ''Crysis'' is a first-person shooter video game series created by Crytek. The series revolves around a group of military protagonists with " nanosuits", technologically advanced suits of armor that give them enhanced physical strength, speed, ...
''. The DirectX 10 SDK became available in February 2007.


Direct3D 10.0

Direct3D 10.0 level hardware must support the following features: the ability to process entire primitives in the new geometry-shader stage, the ability to output pipeline-generated vertex data to memory using the stream-output stage, multisampled alpha-to-coverage support, readback of a depth/stencil surface or a multisampled resource once it is no longer bound as a render target, full HLSL integration – all Direct3D 10 shaders are written in HLSL and implemented with the common-shader core, integer and bitwise shader operations, organization of pipeline state into 5 immutable state objects, organization of shader constants into constant buffers, increased number of render targets, textures, and samplers, no shader length limit, new resource types and resource formats, layered runtime/API layers, option to perform per-primitive material swapping and setup using a geometry shader, increased generalization of resource access using a view, removed legacy hardware capability bits (caps). * Fixed pipelines are being done away with in favor of fully programmable pipelines (often referred to as unified pipeline architecture), which can be programmed to emulate the same. * New state object to enable (mostly) the CPU to change states efficiently. *
Shader model 4.0 The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
enhances the programmability of the
graphics pipeline In computer graphics, a computer graphics pipeline, rendering pipeline or simply graphics pipeline, is a conceptual model that describes what steps a graphics system needs to perform to Rendering (computer graphics), render a ...
. It adds instructions for integer and bitwise calculations. * The common shader core provides a full set of IEEE-compliant 32-bit integer and bitwise operations. These operations enable a new class of algorithms in graphics hardware—examples include compression and packing techniques, FFTs, and bitfield program-flow control. * Geometry shaders, which work on adjacent triangles which form a
mesh A mesh is a barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible or ductile materials. A mesh is similar to a web or a net in that it has many attached or woven strands. Types * A plastic mesh may be extruded, oriented, ex ...
. *
Texture Texture may refer to: Science and technology * Surface texture, the texture means smoothness, roughness, or bumpiness of the surface of an object * Texture (roads), road surface characteristics with waves shorter than road roughness * Texture ...
arrays enable swapping of textures in GPU without CPU intervention. *
Predicated rendering This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics. For more general computer hardware terms, see glossary of computer hardware terms. 0–9 A B ...
allows drawing calls to be ignored based on some other conditions. This enables rapid
occlusion culling In 3D computer graphics, hidden-surface determination (also known as shown-surface determination, hidden-surface removal (HSR), occlusion culling (OC) or visible-surface determination (VSD)) is the process of identifying what surfaces and parts o ...
, which prevents objects from being rendered if it is not visible or too far to be visible. * Instancing 2.0 support, allowing multiple instances of similar meshes, such as armies, or grass or trees, to be rendered in a single draw call, reducing the processing time needed for multiple similar objects to that of a single one.


Direct3D 10.1

Direct3D 10.1 was announced by Microsoft shortly after the release of Direct3D 10 as a minor update. The specification was finalized with the release of November 2007 DirectX SDK and the runtime was shipped with the
Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
SP1, which is available since mid-March 2008. Direct3D 10.1 sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, and gives developers more control over image quality. Features include finer control over anti-aliasing (both multisampling and supersampling with per sample shading and application control over sample position) and more flexibilities to some of the existing features (cubemap arrays and independent blending modes). Direct3D 10.1 level hardware must support the following features: Multisampling has been enhanced to generalize coverage based transparency and make multisampling work more effectively with multi-pass rendering, better culling behavior – Zero-area faces are automatically culled; this affects wireframe rendering only, independent blend modes per render target, new sample-frequency pixel shader execution with primitive rasterization, increased pipeline stage bandwidth, both color and depth/stencil MSAA surfaces can now be used with CopyResource as either a source or destination, MultisampleEnable only affects line rasterization (points and triangles are unaffected), and is used to choose a line drawing algorithm. This means that some multisample rasterization from Direct3D 10 are no longer supported, Texture Sampling – sample_c and sample_c_lz instructions are defined to work with both Texture2DArrays and TextureCubeArrays use the Location member (the alpha component) to specify an array index, support for TextureCubeArrays. * Mandatory 32-bit
floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...
filtering. * Floating Point Rules – Uses the same IEEE-754 rules for floating-point EXCEPT 32-bit floating point operations have been tightened to produce a result within 0.5 unit-last-place (0.5 ULP) of the infinitely precise result. This applies to addition, subtraction, and multiplication. (accuracy to 0.5 ULP for multiply, 1.0 ULP for reciprocal). * Formats – The precision of float16 blending has increased to 0.5 ULP. Blending is also required for UNORM16/SNORM16/SNORM8 formats. * Format Conversion while copying between certain 32/64/128 bit prestructured, typed resources and compressed representations of the same bit widths. * Mandatory support for 4x MSAA for all render targets except R32G32B32A32 and R32G32B32. *
Shader model The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
4.1 Unlike Direct3D 10 which strictly required Direct3D 10-class hardware and driver interfaces, Direct3D 10.1 runtime can run on Direct3D 10.0 hardware using a concept of " feature levels", but new features are supported exclusively by new hardware which expose feature level 10_1. The only available Direct3D 10.1 hardware as of June 2008 were the
Radeon HD 3000 series The graphics processing unit (GPU) codenamed the Radeon R600 is the foundation of the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series and the FireGL 2007 series video cards developed by ATI Technologies. Architecture This article is about all products under the bra ...
and
Radeon HD 4000 series The Radeon R700 is the engineering codename for a graphics processing unit series developed by Advanced Micro Devices under the ATI Technologies, ATI brand name. The foundation chip, codenamed ''RV770'', was announced and demonstrated on June 16, ...
from
ATI Ati or ATI may refer to: * Ati people, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines **Ati language (Philippines), the language spoken by this people group ** Ati-Atihan festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines *Ati language (China), a ...
; in 2009, they were joined by Chrome 430/440GT GPUs from
S3 Graphics S3 Graphics, Ltd (commonly referred to as S3) was an American computer graphics company. The company sold the Trio, ViRGE, Savage 3D, and Chrome series of graphics processors. Struggling against competition from 3dfx Interactive, ATI and Nvid ...
and select lower-end models in
GeForce 200 series The GeForce 200 series is a series of Tesla-based GeForce graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. Architecture The GeForce 200 Series introduced Nvidia's second generation of Tesla (microarchitecture), Nvidia's unified shader architec ...
from
Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
. In 2011,
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
chipsets started supporting Direct3D 10.1 with the introduction of
Intel HD Graphics Intel Graphics Technology (GT) is the collective name for a series of integrated graphics processors (IGPs) produced by Intel that are manufactured on the same package or die as the central processing unit (CPU). It was first introduced in 2010 ...
2000 (GMA HD).


Direct3D 11

Direct3D 11 was released as part of Windows 7. It was presented at Gamefest 2008 on July 22, 2008 and demonstrated at the Nvision 08 technical conference on August 26, 2008. The Direct3D 11 Technical Preview has been included in November 2008 release of DirectX SDK. AMD previewed working DirectX11 hardware at Computex on June 3, 2009, running some DirectX 11 SDK samples. The Direct3D 11 runtime is able to run on Direct3D 9 and 10.x-class hardware and drivers using the concept of "feature levels", expanding on the functionality first introduced in Direct3D 10.1 runtime. Feature levels allow developers to unify the rendering pipeline under Direct3D 11 API and make use of API improvements such as better resource management and multithreading even on entry-level cards, though advanced features such as new shader models and rendering stages will only be exposed on up-level hardware. There are three "10 Level 9" profiles which encapsulate various capabilities of popular DirectX 9.0a cards, and Direct3D 10, 10.1, and 11 each have a separate feature level; each upper level is a strict superset of a lower level.
Tessellation A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane (mathematics), plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to high-dimensional ...
was earlier considered for Direct3D 10, but was later abandoned. GPUs such as
Radeon R600 The graphics processing unit (GPU) codenamed Radeon R600 is the foundation of the Radeon HD 2000 series and the FireGL 2007 series video cards developed by ATI Technologies. The HD 2000 cards competed with nVidia's GeForce 8 series. Architect ...
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). Older graphics hardware such as Radeon 8xxx, GeForce 3/4 had support for another form of tesselation (RT patches, N patches) but those technologies never saw substantial use. As such, their support was dropped from newer hardware. Microsoft has also hinted at other features such as
order independent transparency Order-independent transparency (OIT) is a class of techniques in rasterisational computer graphics for rendering transparency in a 3D scene, which do not require rendering geometry in sorted order for alpha compositing. Description Commonly, 3D g ...
, which was never exposed by the Direct3D API but supported almost transparently by early Direct3D hardware such as Videologic's PowerVR line of chips.


Direct3D 11.0

Direct3D 11.0 features include: Support for Shader Model 5.0, Dynamic shader linking, addressable resources, additional resource types, subroutines, geometry instancing, coverage as pixel shader input, programmable interpolation of inputs, new texture compression formats (1 new LDR format and 1 new HDR format), texture clamps to limit WDDM preload, require 8-bits of subtexel and sub-mip precision on texture filtering, 16K texture limits, Gather4(support for multi-component textures, support for programmable offsets), DrawIndirect, conservative oDepth, Depth Bias, addressable stream output, per-resource mipmap clamping, floating-point viewports, shader conversion instructions, improved multithreading. * Shader Model 5 * Support for
Tessellation A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane (mathematics), plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to high-dimensional ...
and Tessellation Shaders to increase at runtime the number of visible polygons from a low detail polygonal model * Multithreaded rendering — to render to the same Direct3D device object from different threads for multi core CPUs * Compute shaders — which exposes the shader pipeline for non-graphical tasks such as
stream processing In computer science, stream processing (also known as event stream processing, data stream processing, or distributed stream processing) is a programming paradigm which views data streams, or sequences of events in time, as the central input and ou ...
and physics acceleration, similar in spirit to what
OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-progra ...
, Nvidia
CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...
,
ATI Stream AMD FireStream was AMD's brand name for their Radeon-based product line targeting stream processing and/or GPGPU in supercomputers. Originally developed by ATI Technologies around the Radeon X1900 XTX in 2006, the product line was previously b ...
, and
HLSL The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
Shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of spec ...
Model 5 achieve among others. * Mandatory support for 4x MSAA for all render targets and 8x MSAA for all render target formats except R32G32B32A32 formats. Other notable features are the addition of two new texture compression algorithms for more efficient packing of high quality and HDR/alpha textures and an increased
texture cache This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics. For more general computer hardware terms, see glossary of computer hardware terms. 0–9 A B ...
. First seen in the
Release Candidate A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...
version,
Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
integrates the first released Direct3D 11 support. The Platform Update for
Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
includes full-featured Direct3D 11 runtime and DXGI 1.1 update, as well as other related components from Windows 7 like
WARP Warp, warped or warping may refer to: Arts and entertainment Books and comics * WaRP Graphics, an alternative comics publisher * ''Warp'' (First Comics), comic book series published by First Comics based on the play ''Warp!'' * Warp (comics), a ...
,
Direct2D Direct2D is a 2D vector graphics application programming interface (API) designed by Microsoft and implemented in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and also Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (with Platform Update i ...
,
DirectWrite DirectWrite is a text layout and glyph rendering API by Microsoft. It was designed to replace GDI/GDI+ and Uniscribe for screen-oriented rendering and was first shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Win ...
, and
WIC The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is an American federal assistance program of the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for healthcare and nutritio ...
.


Direct3D 11.1

Direct3D 11.1 is an update to the API that ships with
Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
. The Direct3D runtime in Windows 8 features
DXGI DirectX Graphics Infrastructure (DXGI) is a user-mode component of Microsoft Windows (for Windows Vista and above) which provides a mapping between particular graphics APIs such as Direct3D 10.0 and above (known in DXGI parlance as producers) and ...
1.2 and requires new WDDM 1.2 device drivers. Preliminary version of the Windows SDK for Windows 8 Developer Preview was released on September 13, 2011. The new API features shader
tracing Tracing may refer to: Computer graphics * Image tracing, digital image processing to convert raster graphics into vector graphics * Path tracing, a method of rendering images of three-dimensional scenes such that the global illumination is faithf ...
and HLSL compiler enhancements, support for minimum precision HLSL scalar data types, UAVs (Unordered Access Views) at every pipeline stage, target-independent rasterization (TIR), option to map SRVs of dynamic buffers with NO_OVERWRITE, shader processing of video resources, option to use logical operations in a render target, option to bind a subrange of a constant buffer to a shader and retrieve it, option to create larger constant buffers than a shader can access, option to discard resources and resource views, option to change subresources with new copy options, option to force the sample count to create a rasterizer state, option to clear all or part of a resource view, option to use Direct3D in Session 0 processes, option to specify user clip planes in HLSL on feature level 9 and higher, support for
shadow buffer This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics. For more general computer hardware terms, see glossary of computer hardware terms. 0–9 A B ...
on feature level 9, support for video playback, extended support for shared Texture2D resources, and on-the-fly swapping between Direct3D 10 and 11 contexts and feature levels. Direct3D 11.1 includes new feature level 11_1, which brings minor updates to the shader language, such as larger constant buffers and optional double-precision instructions, as well as improved blending modes and mandatory support for 16-bit color formats to improve the performance of entry-level GPUs such as
Intel HD Graphics Intel Graphics Technology (GT) is the collective name for a series of integrated graphics processors (IGPs) produced by Intel that are manufactured on the same package or die as the central processing unit (CPU). It was first introduced in 2010 ...
. WARP has been updated to support feature level 11_1. The Platform Update for
Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
includes a limited set of features from Direct3D 11.1, though components that depend on WDDM 1.2 – such as feature level 11_1 and its related APIs, or
quad buffering In computer science, multiple buffering is the use of more than one buffer to hold a block of data, so that a "reader" will see a complete (though perhaps old) version of the data, rather than a partially updated version of the data being create ...
for stereoscopic rendering – are not present.


Direct3D 11.2

Direct3D 11.2 was shipped with Windows 8.1. New hardware features require DXGI 1.3 with WDDM 1.3 drivers and include runtime shader modification and linking, Function linking graph(FLG), inbox
HLSL The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
compiler, option to annotate graphics commands. Feature levels 11_0 and 11_1 introduce optional support for tiled resources with shader level of detail clamp (Tier2). The latter feature effectively provides control over the hardware
page table A page table is the data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer operating system to store the mapping between virtual addresses and physical addresses. Virtual addresses are used by the program executed by the accessing process, ...
s present in many current GPUs.
WARP Warp, warped or warping may refer to: Arts and entertainment Books and comics * WaRP Graphics, an alternative comics publisher * ''Warp'' (First Comics), comic book series published by First Comics based on the play ''Warp!'' * Warp (comics), a ...
was updated to fully support the new features. There is no feature level 11_2 however; the new features are dispersed across existing feature levels. Those that are hardware-dependent can be checked individually via CheckFeatureSupport. Some of the "new" features in Direct3D 11.2 actually expose some old hardware features in a more granular way; for example D3D11_FEATURE_D3D9_SIMPLE_INSTANCING_SUPPORT exposes partial support for instancing on feature level 9_1 and 9_2 hardware, otherwise fully supported from feature level 9_3 onward. Direct3D 11.X Direct3D 11.X is a superset of DirectX 11.2 running on the
Xbox One The Xbox One is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. Announced in May 2013, it is the successor to Xbox 360 and the third base console in the Xbox series of video game consoles. It was first released in North America, parts of ...
. It includes some features, such as draw bundles, that were later announced as part of DirectX 12.Chris Tector's segment of http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/DirectX-Developer-Blog/DirectX-Evolving-Microsoft-s-Graphics-Platform (starting approx. 18 minute in.)


Direct3D 11.3

Direct3D 11.3 shipped in July 2015 with Windows 10; it includes minor rendering features from Direct3D 12, while keeping the overall structure of the Direct3D 11.x API. Direct3D 11.3 introduces Shader Model 5.1, optional Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed Unordered Access View Loads, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), optional Standard Swizzle, optional Default Texture Mapping, Conservative Rasterization(out of three tiers), optional Unified Memory Access (UMA) support, and additional Tiled Resources(tier 2)(Volume tiled resources).


Direct3D 11.4

* Direct3D 11.4 version 1511 – Initial Direct3D 11.4 was introduced with Windows 10 Threshold 2 update (version 1511) improving external graphics adapters support and DXGI 1.5. * Direct3D 11.4 version 1607 – Updated Direct3D 11.4 with Windows 10 Anniversary Update (version 1607) includes support WDDM 2.1 and for UHDTV HDR10 format ( ST 2084) and variable refresh rates support for UWP applications.


Direct3D 12

Direct3D 12 allows a lower level of hardware abstraction than earlier versions, enabling future games to significantly improve multithreaded scaling and decrease CPU utilization. This is achieved by better matching the Direct3D abstraction layer with the underlying hardware, by means of new features such as Indirect Drawing, descriptor tables, concise pipeline state objects, and draw call bundles. Reducing driver overhead is in fact the main attraction of Direct3D 12, similarly to AMD's Mantle; in the words of its lead developer Max McMullen, the main goal of Direct3D 12 is to achieve "console-level efficiency" and improved CPU parallelism. Although Nvidia has announced broad support for Direct3D 12, they were also somewhat reserved about the universal appeal of the new API, noting that while game engine developers may be enthusiastic about directly managing GPU resources from their application code, "a lot of
ther Ther may refer to: *''Thér.'', taxonomic author abbreviation of Irénée Thériot (1859–1947), French bryologist * Agroha Mound, archaeological site in Agroha, Hisar district, India *Therapy *Therapeutic drugs See also *''Ther Thiruvizha ''T ...
folks wouldn't" be happy to have to do that. Some new hardware features are also in Direct3D 12, including Shader Model 5.1, Volume Tiled Resources(Tier 2), Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed UAV Load, Conservative Rasterization(Tier 1), better collision and culling with Conservative Rasterization, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), Standard Swizzles, Default Texture Mapping, Swap Chains, swizzled resources and compressed resources, additional
blend mode A blend is a mixture of two or more different things or substances; e.g., a product of a mixer or blender. Blend Blend may also refer to: * Blend word, a word formed from parts of other words * ''Blend'' (album), a 1996 album by BoDeans * ...
s, programmable blend and efficient
order-independent transparency Order-independent transparency (OIT) is a class of techniques in rasterisational computer graphics for rendering transparency in a 3D scene, which do not require rendering geometry in sorted order for alpha compositing. Description Commonly, 3D g ...
(OIT) with pixel ordered UAV. Pipeline state objects have evolved from Direct3D 11, and the new concise pipeline states mean that the process has been simplified. DirectX 11 offered flexibility in how its states could be altered, to the detriment of performance. Simplifying the process and unifying the pipelines (e.g. pixel shader states) lead to a more streamlined process, significantly reducing the overheads and allowing the graphics card to draw more calls for each frame. Direct3D 12 also learned from AMD Mantle in command lists and bundles, aiming to ensure the CPU and GPU working together in a more balanced manner. Within Direct3D 11, the commands are sent from the CPU to the GPU one by one, and the GPU works through these commands sequentially. This means that commands are bottlenecked by the speed at which the CPU could send these commands in a linear fashion. Within DirectX 12 these commands are sent as command lists, containing all the required information within a single package. The GPU is then capable of computing and executing this command in one single process, without having to wait on any additional information from the CPU. Within these command lists are bundles. Where previously commands were just taken, used, and then forgotten by the GPU, bundles can be reused. This decreases the workload of the GPU and means repeated assets can be used much faster. While resource binding is fairly convenient in Direct3D 11 for developers at the moment, its inefficiency means several modern hardware capabilities are being drastically underused. When a game engine needed resources in DX11, it had to draw the data from scratch every time, meaning repeat processes and unnecessary uses. In Direct3D 12, descriptor heaps and tables mean the most often used resources can be allocated by developers in tables, which the GPU can quickly and easily access. This can contribute to better performance than Direct3D 11 on equivalent hardware, but it also entails more work for the developer. Dynamic Heaps are also a feature of Direct3D 12. Direct3D 12 features explicit multi-adapter support, allowing the explicit control of multiple GPUs configuration systems. Such configurations can be built with graphics adapter of the same hardware vendor as well of different hardware vendor together. An experimental support of D3D 12 for Windows 7 SP1 has been released by Microsoft in 2019 via a dedicated NuGet package. * Direct3D 12 version 1607 – With the Windows 10 anniversary update (version 1607), released on August 2, 2016, the Direct3D 12 runtime has been updated to support constructs for explicit multithreading and inter-process communication, allowing developers to take advantage of modern massively parallel GPUs. Other features include updated root signatures version 1.1, as well as support for
HDR10 HDR10 Media Profile, more commonly known as HDR10, is an open high-dynamic-range video (HDR) standard announced on 27 August 2015 by the Consumer Technology Association. It is the most widespread of the HDR formats. HDR10 is not backward compat ...
format and
variable refresh rate Variable refresh rate (VRR) refers to a dynamic display that can continuously and seamlessly change its refresh rate without user input. A display supporting a variable refresh rate usually supports a specific ''range'' of refresh rates (e.g. 30 ...
s. * Direct3D 12 version 1703 – With the Windows 10 Creators Update (version 1703), released on April 11, 2017, the Direct3D 12 runtime has been updated to support Shader Model 6.0 and DXIL. and Shader Model 6.0 requires Windows 10 Anniversary Update (version 1607), WDDM 2.1. New graphical features are Depth Bounds Testing and Programmable MSAA. * Direct3D 12 version 1709 – Direct3D in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (version 1709), released on October 17, 2017, includes improved debugging. * Direct3D 12 version 1809 – Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) brings support for
DirectX Raytracing DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a feature introduced in Microsoft's DirectX 12 that implements ray tracing, for video graphic rendering. DXR was released with the Windows 10 October update (version 1809) on October 10, 2018. It requires an AMD Rade ...
so GPUs can benefit from its API. * Direct3D 12 version 1903 – Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903) brings support for
DirectML Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardwa ...
. * Direct3D 12 version 2004 – Windows 10 May 2020 Update (version 2004) brings support for Mesh & Amplification Shaders, Sampler Feedback, as well DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1 and memory allocation improvements.


Architecture

Direct3D is a Microsoft
DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
API subsystem component. The aim of Direct3D is to abstract the communication between a graphics application and the graphics hardware drivers. It is presented like a thin abstract layer at a level comparable to
GDI GDI may refer to: Science and technology * Gasoline direct injection, a type of fuel injection * Graphics Device Interface, a component of Microsoft Windows * Guanosine nucleotide dissociation inhibitor, a protein Organisations * Gabriel Dumont I ...
(see attached diagram). Direct3D contains numerous features that GDI lacks. Direct3D is an ''Immediate mode'' graphics API. It provides a low-level interface to every video card 3D function ('' transformations, clipping, lighting'', ''materials'', ''textures'', '' depth buffering'' and so on). It once had a higher level ''Retained mode'' component, now officially discontinued. Direct3D immediate mode presents three main abstractions: ''devices'', ''resources'' and '' Swap Chains'' (see attached diagram). ''Devices'' are responsible for rendering the 3D scene. They provide an interface with different rendering capabilities. For example, the
mono Mono may refer to: Common meanings * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monaural, monophonic sound reproduction, often shortened to mono * Mono-, a numerical prefix representing anything single Music Performers * Mono (Japanese b ...
device provides white and black rendering, while the
RGB The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three addi ...
device renders in color. There are four types of devices: * HAL (
hardware abstraction layer Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that provide programs with access to hardware resources through programming interfaces. The programming interface allows all devices in a particular class ''C'' of hardware devices to be acce ...
) device: For devices supporting hardware acceleration. * Reference device: Simulates new functions not yet available in hardware. It is necessary to install the Direct3D SDK to use this device type. * Null reference device: Does nothing. This device is used when the SDK is not installed and a reference device is requested. * Pluggable software device: Performs software rendering. This device was introduced with DirectX 9.0. Every device contains at least one ''swap chain''. A ''swap chain'' is made up of one or more back
buffer Buffer may refer to: Science * Buffer gas, an inert or nonflammable gas * Buffer solution, a solution used to prevent changes in pH * Buffering agent, the weak acid or base in a buffer solution * Lysis buffer, in cell biology * Metal ion buffer * ...
surfaces. Rendering occurs in the
back buffer In computer science, multiple buffering is the use of more than one buffer to hold a block of data, so that a "reader" will see a complete (though perhaps old) version of the data, rather than a partially updated version of the data being creat ...
. Moreover, devices contain a collection of ''resources''; specific data used during rendering. Each resource has four attributes: * Type: Determines the type of resource: surface, volume, texture, cube texture, volume texture, surface texture, index buffer or vertex buffer. *
Pool Pool may refer to: Water pool * Swimming pool, usually an artificial structure containing a large body of water intended for swimming * Reflecting pool, a shallow pool designed to reflect a structure and its surroundings * Tide pool, a rocky po ...
: Describes how the resource is managed by the runtime and where it is stored. In the Default pool the resource will exist only in device memory. Resources in the managed pool will be stored in system memory, and will be sent to the device when required. Resources in system memory pool will only exist in system memory. Finally, the scratch pool is basically the same as the system memory pool, but resources are not bound by hardware restrictions. * Format: Describes the layout of the resource data in memory. For example, ''D3DFMT_R8G8B8'' format value means a 24 bits
color depth Color depth or colour depth (see spelling differences), also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to ...
(8 bits for red, 8 bits for green and 8 bits for blue). * Usage: Describes, with a collection of
flag A flag is a piece of fabric (most often rectangular or quadrilateral) with a distinctive design and colours. It is used as a symbol, a signalling device, or for decoration. The term ''flag'' is also used to refer to the graphic design empl ...
bits, how the resource will be used by the application. These flags dictate which resources are used in dynamic or static access patterns. Static resource values don't change after being loaded, whereas dynamic resource values may be modified. Direct3D implements two display modes: * Fullscreen mode: The Direct3D application generates all of the graphical output for a display device. In this mode Direct3D automatically captures Alt-Tab and sets/restores screen resolution and pixel format without the programmer intervention. This also provides plenty of problems for debugging due to the 'Exclusive Cooperative Mode'. * Windowed mode: The result is shown inside the area of a window. Direct3D communicates with
GDI GDI may refer to: Science and technology * Gasoline direct injection, a type of fuel injection * Graphics Device Interface, a component of Microsoft Windows * Guanosine nucleotide dissociation inhibitor, a protein Organisations * Gabriel Dumont I ...
to generate the graphical output in the display. Windowed mode can have the same level of performance as full-screen, depending on driver support.


Pipeline

The Microsoft Direct3D 11 API defines a process to convert a group of vertices, textures, buffers, and state into an image on the screen. This process is described as a rendering pipeline with several distinct stages. The different stages of the Direct3D 11 pipeline are: # Input-Assembler: Reads in vertex data from an application supplied vertex buffer and feeds them down the pipeline. #
Vertex Shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of speci ...
: Performs operations on a single vertex at a time, such as transformations, skinning, or lighting. # Hull-Shader: Performs operations on sets of patch control points, and generates additional data known as patch constants. # Tessellator: Subdivides geometry to create higher-order representations of the hull. # Domain-Shader: Performs operations on vertices output by the tessellation stage, in much the same way as a vertex shader. #
Geometry Shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of speci ...
: Processes entire primitives such as triangles, points, or lines. Given a primitive, this stage discards it, or generates one or more new primitives. # Stream-Output: Can write out the previous stage's results to memory. This is useful to recirculate data back into the pipeline. # Rasterizer: Converts primitives into pixels, feeding these pixels into the pixel shader. The Rasterizer may also perform other tasks such as clipping what is not visible, or interpolating vertex data into per-pixel data. #
Pixel Shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the Rendering (computer graphics), rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved ...
: Determines the final pixel color to be written to the render target and can also calculate a depth value to be written to the depth buffer. # Output-Merger: Merges various types of output data (
pixel shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the Rendering (computer graphics), rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved ...
values, alpha blending, depth/stencil...) to build the final result. The pipeline stages illustrated with a round box are fully programmable. The application provides a shader program that describes the exact operations to be completed for that stage. Many stages are optional and can be disabled altogether.


Feature levels

In Direct3D 5 to 9, when new versions of the API introduced support for new hardware capabilities, most of them were optional – each graphics vendor maintained their own set of supported features in addition to the basic required functionality. Support for individual features had to be determined using "capability bits" or "caps", making cross-vendor graphics programming a complex task. Direct3D 10 introduced a much simplified set of mandatory hardware requirements based on most popular Direct3D 9 capabilities which all supporting graphics cards had to adhere to, with only a few optional capabilities for supported texture formats and operations. Direct3D 10.1 added a few new mandatory hardware requirements, and to remain compatible with 10.0 hardware and drivers, these features were encapsulated in two sets called "feature levels", with 10.1 level forming a superset of 10.0 level. As Direct3D 11.0, 11.1 and 12 added support for new hardware, new mandatory capabilities were further grouped in upper feature levels. Direct3D 11 also introduced "10level9", a subset of the Direct3D 10 API with three feature levels encapsulating various Direct3D 9 cards with WDDM drivers, and Direct3D 11.1 re-introduced a few optional features for all levels, which were expanded in Direct3D 11.2 and later versions. This approach allows developers to unify the rendering pipeline and use a single version of the API on both newer and older hardware, taking advantage of performance and usability improvements in the newer runtime. New feature levels are introduced with updated versions of the API and typically encapsulate: * major mandatory features – (Direct3D 11.0, 12), * a few minor features (Direct3D 10.1, 11.1), or * a common set of previously optional features (Direct3D 11.0 "10 level 9"). Each upper level is a strict superset of a lower level, with only a few new or previously optional features that move to the core functionality on an upper level. More advanced features in a major revision of the Direct3D API such as new shader models and rendering stages are only exposed on up-level hardware. Separate capabilities exist to indicate support for specific texture operations and resource formats; these are specified per each texture format using a combination of capability flags. Feature levels use underscore as a delimiter (i.e. "12_1"), while API/runtime versions use dot (i.e. "Direct3D 11.4").


Direct3D 11 levels

In Direct3D 11.4 for Windows 10, there are nine feature levels provided by structure; levels 9_1, 9_2 and 9_3 (collectively known as Direct3D 10 Level 9) re-encapsulate various features of popular Direct3D 9 cards, levels 10_0, 10_1 refer to respective legacy versions of Direct3D 10, 11_0 and 11_1 reflects the feature introduced with Direct3D 11 and Direct3D 11.1 APIs and runtimes, while levels 12_0 and 12_1 correspond the new feature levels introduced with the Direct3D 12 API.


Direct3D 12 levels

Direct3D 12 for Windows 10 requires graphics hardware conforming to feature levels 11_0 and 11_1 which support virtual memory address translations and requires WDDM 2.0 drivers. There are two new feature levels, 12_0 and 12_1, which include some new features exposed by Direct3D 12 that are optional on levels 11_0 and 11_1. Some previously optional features are realigned as baseline on levels 11_0 and 11_1. Shader Model 6.0 has been released with Windows 10 Creators Update and requires Windows 10 Anniversary Update, WDDM 2.1 drivers. Direct3D 12 introduces a revamped resource binding model which allows explicit control of memory. Abstract "resource view" objects are now represented with resource descriptors, which are allocated using memory heaps and tables. Resource Binding tiers define maximum number of resources that can be addressed using CBV (constant buffer view), SRV (shader resource view) and UAV (unordered access view), as well as texture sampler units. Tier 3 hardware allows fully bindless resources only restricted by the size of the descriptor heap, while Tier 1 and Tier 2 hardware impose some limits on the number of descriptors ("views") that can be used simultaneously.


Multithreading

WDDM driver model in Windows Vista and higher supports arbitrarily large number of execution contexts (or threads) in hardware or in software. Windows XP only supported multitasked access to Direct3D, where separate applications could execute in different windows and be hardware accelerated, and the OS had limited control about what the GPU could do and the driver could switch execution threads arbitrarily. The ability to execute the runtime in a multi-threaded mode has been introduced with Direct3D 11 runtime. Each execution context is presented with a resource view of the GPU. Execution contexts are protected from each other, however a rogue or badly written app can take control of the execution in the user-mode driver and could potentially access data from another process within GPU memory by sending modified commands. Though protected from access by another app, a well-written app still needs to protect itself against failures and device loss caused by other applications. The OS manages the threads all by itself, allowing the hardware to switch from one thread to the other when appropriate, and also handles memory management and paging (to system memory and to disk) via integrated OS-kernel memory management. Finer-grained context switching, i.e. being able to switch two execution threads at the shader-instruction level instead of the single-command level or even batch of commands, was introduced in WDDM/DXGI 1.2 which shipped with Windows 8. This overcomes a potential scheduling problem when application would have very long execution of a single command/batch of commands and will have to be terminated by the OS watchdog timer. WDDM 2.0 and DirectX 12 have been reengineered to allow fully multithreaded draw calls. This was achieved by making all resources immutable (i.e. read-only), serializing the rendering states and using draw call bundles. This avoids complex resource management in the kernel-mode driver, making possible multiple reentrant calls to the user-mode driver via concurrent executions contexts supplied by separate rendering threads in the same application.


Direct3D Mobile

Direct3D Mobile is derived from Direct3D but has a smaller
memory footprint Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running. The word footprint generally refers to the extent of physical dimensions that an object occupies, giving a sense of its size. In computing, the ...
.
Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is base ...
provides Direct3D Mobile support.


Alternative implementations

The following alternative implementations of Direct3D API exist. They are useful for non-Windows platforms and for hardware without some versions of DX support: * WineD3D – The Wine open source project has working implementations of the Direct3D APIs via translation to
OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
. Wine's implementation can also be run on Windows under certain conditions. * vkd3d – vkd3d is an open source 3D graphics library built on top of Vulkan which allows to run Direct3D 12 applications on top of
Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...
. It's primarily used by the
Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...
project, and is now included with Valve's Proton project bundled with steam on linux. * DXVK – An open source
Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...
-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
using Wine. It is used by
Proton A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol , H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 ''e'' elementary charge. Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton–electron mass ...
/
Steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization ...
for Linux. DXVK is able to run a large number of modern Windows games under Linux. ** D9VK – A fork of DXVK for adding Direct3D 9 support, included with Steam/Proton on Linux. On December 16, 2019 D9VK was merged into DXVK. * Gallium Nine – Gallium Nine makes it possible to run Direct3D 9 applications on Linux natively, i.e. without any calls translation which allows for a near native speed. It requires the cooperation of Wine and
Mesa A mesa is an isolated, flat-topped elevation, ridge or hill, which is bounded from all sides by steep escarpments and stands distinctly above a surrounding plain. Mesas characteristically consist of flat-lying soft sedimentary rocks capped by ...
.


Related tools


D3DX

Direct3D comes with D3DX, a library of tools designed to perform common mathematical calculations on vectors,
matrices Matrix most commonly refers to: * ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise ** ''The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film ** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchis ...
and colors, calculating look-at and
projection Projection, projections or projective may refer to: Physics * Projection (physics), the action/process of light, heat, or sound reflecting from a surface to another in a different direction * The display of images by a projector Optics, graphic ...
matrices,
spline interpolation In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, spline interpolation is a form of interpolation where the interpolant is a special type of piecewise polynomial called a spline. That is, instead of fitting a single, high-degree polynomial to all ...
s, and several more complicated tasks, such as compiling or assembling shaders used for 3D graphic programming, compressed
skeletal animation Skeletal animation or rigging is a technique in computer animation in which a character (or other articulated object) is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called the ''mesh'' or ''skin'') and a hierarc ...
storage and matrix stacks. There are several functions that provide complex operations over 3D
mesh A mesh is a barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible or ductile materials. A mesh is similar to a web or a net in that it has many attached or woven strands. Types * A plastic mesh may be extruded, oriented, ex ...
es like tangent-space computation, mesh simplification,
precomputed radiance transfer Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) is a computer graphics technique used to render a scene in real time with complex light interactions being precomputed to save time. Radiosity methods can be used to determine the diffuse lighting of the scene, ...
, optimizing for vertex cache friendliness and stripification, and generators for 3D text meshes. 2D features include classes for drawing screen-space lines, text and sprite based
particle system A particle system is a technique in game physics, motion graphics, and computer graphics that uses many minute sprites, 3D models, or other graphic objects to simulate certain kinds of "fuzzy" phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to repr ...
s. Spatial functions include various intersection routines, conversion from/to
barycentric coordinates In mathematics, an affine space is a geometric structure that generalizes some of the properties of Euclidean spaces in such a way that these are independent of the concepts of distance and measure of angles, keeping only the properties related ...
and
bounding box In geometry, the minimum or smallest bounding or enclosing box for a point set in dimensions is the box with the smallest measure (area, volume, or hypervolume in higher dimensions) within which all the points lie. When other kinds of measure ...
/sphere generators. D3DX is provided as a
dynamic link library Dynamic-link library (DLL) is Microsoft's implementation of the shared library concept in the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems. These libraries usually have the file extension DLL, OCX (for libraries containing ActiveX controls), or ...
(DLL). D3DX is deprecated from Windows 8 onward and can't be used in Windows Store apps. Some features present in previous versions of D3DX were removed in Direct3D 11 and now provided as separate sources: * Windows SDK and Visual Studio * A large part of the math library has been removed. Microsoft recommends use of the DirectX Math library instead. * Spherical harmonics math has been removed and is now distributed as source. * The Effect framework has been removed and is now distributed as source via CodePlex. * The Mesh interface and geometry functions have been removed and are now distributed as source via CodePlex under DirectXMesh geometry processing library. * Texture functions have been removed and are now distributed as source via CodePlex under DirectXTex texture processing library. * General helpers have been removed and are now distributed as source via CodePlex under DirectX Tool Kit (DirectXTK) project. * The isochart texture atlas has been removed and is now distributed as source via CodePlex under UVAtlas project.


DXUT

DXUT (also called the sample framework) is a layer built on top of the Direct3D API. The framework is designed to help the programmer spend less time with mundane tasks, such as creating a window, creating a device, processing Windows messages and handling device events. DXUT have been removed with the Windows SDK 8.0 and now distributed as source via CodePlex.


See also

*
Vulkan (API) Vulkan is a low-Overhead (computing), overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and compute kernel, computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulka ...
- Main competitor of Direct3D 12 *
OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
– Main competitor of Direct3D up to version 11 *
3D computer graphics 3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for th ...
*
ANGLE (software) ANGLE (''Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine'') is an open source, cross-platform graphics engine abstraction layer developed by Google. ANGLE translates OpenGL ES 2/3 calls to DirectX 9, 11, OpenGL or Vulkan API calls. It's a portable versio ...
*
DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as m ...
*
DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
– Collection of APIs in which Direct3D is implemented *
HLSL The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
– High Level Shader Language *
Metal (API) Metal is a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader API created by Apple. It debuted in iOS 8. Metal combines functions similar to OpenGL and OpenCL in one API. It is intended to improve performance by offeri ...
*
Mantle (API) Mantle was a low-overhead rendering API targeted at 3D video games. AMD originally developed Mantle in cooperation with DICE, starting in 2013. Mantle was designed as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on personal computer ...
*
Shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of spec ...
*
Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...
*
WebGPU WebGPU is the working name for a future web standard and JavaScript API for accelerated graphics and compute, aiming to provide "modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities". It is developed by the W3C ''GPU for the Web'' Community Group wi ...


References


External links


DirectX websiteMSDN: DirectX Graphics and Gaming


technical article discussing the new features of DirectX 10 and their impact on computer games {{DEFAULTSORT:Direct3d, Microsoft 1995 software 3D graphics APIs 3d Microsoft Direct3D Graphics libraries