When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the X was used as the basis of the name to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. Originally, the runtimes were only installed by games or explicitly by the user. An important factor in the value consumers would place on it was the programs that would be able to run on it. Three Microsoft employees—Craig Eisler,and Eric Engstrom—were concerned because tended to see Microsoft's previous operating system,as a better platform for game programming, meaning few games would be developed for Windows 95 and the operating system would not be as much of a success. This was compounded by negative reception surrounding the Windows port of the video game. Microsoft needed a quick solution for programmers; the operating system was only months away from being released. Eisler development leadSt. John, and Engstrom program manager worked together to fix this problem, with a solution that they eventually named DirectX. DirectX allowed all versions of Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows 95, to incorporate high-performance multimedia. Eisler wrote about the frenzy to build DirectX 1 through 5 in his blog. Since Windows 95 was itself still new and few games had been released for it, Microsoft engaged in heavy promotion of DirectX to developers who were generally distrustful of Microsoft's ability to build a gaming platform in Windows. John, the evangelist for DirectX, staged an elaborate event at the 1996 which game developer Jay Barnson described as a theme, including realtogas, and something resembling an indoor carnival. It was at this event that Microsoft first introduced andand demonstrated multiplayer being played over the Direct x 9 0c. The DirectX team faced the challenging task of testing each DirectX release against an array of and. The DirectX team also built and distributed tests that allowed the hardware industry to confirm that new hardware designs and driver releases would be compatible with DirectX. Prior to DirectX, Microsoft had included on their platform. The Xbox was code named DirectXbox, but this was shortened to Xbox for its commercial name. In 2002, Microsoft released DirectX 9 with support for the use of much longer shader programs than before with pixel and vertex shader version 2. Microsoft has continued to update the DirectX suite since then, introducing Shader Model 3. As of April 2005, was removed from DirectX and moved to the instead. DirectX has been confirmed to be present in Microsoft's. Real-time was announced as in 2018. However, Microsoft publicly denies this account, instead claiming that the logo is merely an artistic design. It also contained for and for accelerated video playback. Deprecated in favor ofthough still in use by a number of games and as a video renderer in media applications. Deprecated after version 8 in favor of and. DirectX functionality is provided in the form of -style objects and interfaces. Microsoft continues to make changes in DirectX 9c, causing support to be dropped for some of the aforementioned operating systems. This also introduced Pixel Shader 2. The user interface relies on D3D 9Ex. This release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality. Direct3D 11 runs on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. Hardware tessellation and Shader Model 5. Microsoft has since released the Direct3D 11 Technical Preview. Direct3D 11 is a strict superset of Direct3D 10. This helps to keep backwards compatibility with previous versions of DirectX. Microsoft released the Final Platform Update for Windows Vista on October 27, 2009, which was 5 days after the initial release of Windows 7 launched with Direct3D 11 as a base standard. It supports for increased performance, features improved integration of now at version 1. It also features support for gaming and video. It added some new features to like geometry realizations. It also added swap chain composition, which allows some elements of the scene to be rendered at lower resolutions and then composited via hardware overlay with other parts rendered at higher resolution. X is a superset of DirectX 11. It actually includes some features, such as draw bundles, that were later announced as part of DirectX 12. It is meant to complement DirectX 12 as a higher-level alternative. It is included with Windows 10. The performance discrepancies may be due to poor Nvidia driver optimizations for DirectX 12, or even hardware limitations of the card which was optimized for DirectX 11 serial execution, however the exact cause remains unclear. Raymond Chen of Microsoft explained in his book, The Old New Thing, that after DirectX 3 was released, Microsoft began developing versions 4 and 5 at the same time. Version 4 was to be a shorter-term direct x 9 0c with small features, whereas version 5 would be a more substantial release. The lack of interest from game developers in the features stated for DirectX 4 resulted in it being shelved, and the corpus of documents that already distinguished the two new versions resulted in Microsoft choosing to not direct x 9 0c version 4 to describe features intended for version 5. The last periodic update was released in June 2010 The February 9, 2005 release is the first 64-bit capable build. The last build for Windows 2000 is the redistributable from February 5, 2010. Put another way, when the above table lists a version as '4. Some hardware devices have only DirectX compatible drivers in other words, one must install DirectX in order to use that hardware. Early versions of DirectX included an up-to-date library of all of the DirectX compatible drivers currently available. This practice was stopped however, in favor of the web-based driver-update system, which allowed users to download only the drivers relevant to their hardware, rather than the entire library. In December 2005, February 2006, April 2006, and August 2006, Microsoft released successive updates to this library, culminating in a beta version called Managed DirectX 2. It also supports the execution of managed code on the Xbox 360. Developers are expected to redistribute the runtime components along with their games or applications. Many of these libraries are cross-platform or have open codebases. Archived from on July 17, 2006. Archived from on 29 November 2012. Windows Vista: The Complete Guide. The Old New Thing 1st ed.
